
Class jP£±^Vf- 

— p- 

Book ._^^a 



Copyright N^. 



ifi-Oi; 



GOIVRIGOT DEPOSir. 



LONGMANS' ENGLISH CLASSICS 

EDITED BY 

GEORGE EICE CARPENTER, A.B. 

PKOFESSOR OF KHETOKTC AK'- EIlGtltH COMPOSfTION I^ COLOMBIA UNIVEKSITT 



THOMAS DE QUINCE Y 



JOAN OF AUG 

AND 

THE ENGLISH M/lIL-COACH 



ILongiiinns' aEnglisl) gTlnss its 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY'S 

JOAN OF ARC 

AND 

THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 

EDITED BY 

CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN, Ph.D. 

ASSISTANT TKOFESSOK OF EUETOlilC IN TALE UNIVEKSITY 




NEW YORK 
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

LONDON AND BOMBAY 
1906 



t^<<; 



■ ^'? 



LTBBARy of congress] 
Two CoDies Received / 

FEB 6 1906 

r) CoDyrighi Entry 

{CLASS a \lc ^ 

COPY B? 



Copyright, 1905, 

BT 

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 



PREFACE 



The text of this edition is that of De Quincey's own 
final revision, Selections, Grave and Gay, from Writings Pub- 
lished and Unpublished (Edinburgh, James Hogg, 1853-60). 
Changes by recent editors make the punctuation seem less 
eccentric, indeed, but also less consistent. Consistently to 
make De Quincey conform to present usage would involve 
revision of his sentences. The obvious lack of warrant for 
this is sufficient reason for letting the text alone. Compro- 
mise gives us neither De Quincey's use nor ours ; and it has 
even led to errors. His own revision was so elaborate and 
minute as to leave no doubt of his final intention. Such 
eccentricities as an odd version of a proper name here and 
there have been corrected as inadvertent ; but inadvertence 
to any point of composition being hardly conceivable of 
De Quincey, his own text has otherwise been reprinted with 
scrupulous faithfulness. 

The introduction and the notes are directed toward making 
the study of these essays critical, systematic, and well pro- 
portioned. Critical, to the extent of comparing methods and 
of distinguishing the gold from the gravel, the study of 
De Quincey not only may be, but ought to be. The immor- 
tals are to be taken on trust. Study of them is largely learn- 
ing how to admire. But De Quincey, being less than immortal, 
being often less than his own better self, invites the student 
to discriminate, and encourages him to think for himself To 
make the study of literature systematic without making it 
formal and rigid is a problem that this volume seeks to 



vi PRE FA CE 

solve practically. To keep due proportion is, first, to lay main 
stress on the study of literature, not as history or biography, 
but as literature; and, secondly, to bring out the author's 
peculiar quality. With De Quincey this quality is an artis- 
tic imagination expressing itself very consciously in skilful 
technic. Therefore he lends himself readily to the study of 
rhetoric and to the correlation of the course in literature with 
the course in composition. 

The editor's obligations to his predecessors, acknowledged 
in place, are here recorded with gratitude. The biographical 
sketch at the beginning of the introduction is reprinted from 
the edition of The Revolt of the Tartars in this series. 



C. S. B. 



Yale University, 

January, 1906. 



CONTENTS 

Introduction p^^^. 

I. Biographical Sketch of De Quincey . . ix 

11. De Quincey's Literary Method .... xxv 

III. Notes for Teachers xxxvi 

Chronological Table xlv 

Joan of Arc 1 

The English Mail-Coach 39 

Notes 99 



INTEODUCTION 

I. Biographical Sketch of De Quiitcey 

The long life of the "English Opium-Eater" (1785- 
1859) almost covered the history of our country from the 
Revolution to the Civil AVar. But he is to be thought of 
as belonging to the literary movement of the early part 
of the century, to the time of his boyish idol, Wordsworth, 
rather than to the time of his later and younger friend 
Carlyle; to the time of Irving rather than to the time of 
Emerson. His father was a Manchester merchant of liter- 
ary tastes, who died early, leaving to his wife and six surviv- 
ing children an income of about eight thousand dollars a 
year. The boy Thomas, brought up among girls and women, 
was thoughtful and imaginative. "From my birth," he 
says, " I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual 
in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been 
even from my schoolboy days. ' ' ^ Add that he was finely 
sensitive, and you will see that such a boy, were he English 
or French or American, would make his own world of 
dreams and live in that. He missed the education of 
cricket and football. No Eton or Eugby forced him to 
be an English boy. AVhen he was only seven, indeed, his 
big brother William came home from school and put him 
through a course of daily brawls with factory boys. At 
length William was able to bestow this faint praise: 
"You're honest; you're willing, though lazy; you would 
pull, if you had the strength of a flea; and, though a 

' Cotifessions. 



X IJSTIWDUUTIOJS 

monstrous coward, you dou't run away.''^ But that is 
the only physical discipline recorded in a life of intellect- 
ual experiences. 

"I was sent to various schools, great and small; and was very 
early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for my 
knowledge of Greek, At thirteen I wrote Greek with ease; and at 
fifteen my command of that language was so great that I not only 
composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse in Greek 
fluently, and without embarrassment — an accomplishment which 
I have not since met with in any scholar of my times, and which, in 
my case, was owing to the practice of daily reading off the news- 
papers into the best Greek I could furnish extempore ; for the neces- 
sity of ransacking my memory and invention for all sorts and 
combinations of periphrastic expressions, as equivalents for modern 
ideas, images, relations of things, etc., gave me a compass of diction 
which would never have been called out by a dull translation of 
moral essays, etc. * That boy,' said one of my masters, pointing the 
attention of a stranger to me, ' that boy could harangue an Athe- 
nian mob better than you or I could address an English one,' He 
who honoured me with this eulogy was a scholar, 'and a ripe and 
good one ; ' and, of all my tutors, was the only one whom I loved or 
reverenced. Unfortunately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, 
to this worthy man's great indignation), I was transferred to the 
care, first of a blockhead, who was in a perpetual panic lest I should 
expose his ignorance ; and finally, to that of a respectable scholar, 
at the head of a great school on an ancient foundation." '•' 

Try to pierce through the egotism of the record, which 
comes, not from vulgar vanity, but from a solitary life, to 
the high desires and attainments of this precocious boy. 
True, in his fifteenth year, visiting at Laxton, the country- 
seat of a family friend. Lady Carbery, he is found acting 
as literary adviser to the household; but to gain the affec- 
tion and admiration of this versatile woman, till she was 
like a sister to him, he must have been more than a prig. 
The same endearing quality appears in his visit to Ireland 

^ Aufohiograjjhic SkefcJies, i. 39. ^Confessions. 



INTRODUCTION xi 

with a lad of his own age, Lord Westjjort, and in the pleas- 
ure Lord Westport's father, Lord Altaniont, found in 
talking with the brilliant boy. This middle-aged Irish 
peer even kept up for some time a correspondence with 
De Quincey. More than Greek and Latin, then, the boy 
had learned at fifteen. Many years afterward he could 
write on the Irish rebellions from the first-hand knowl- 
edge he had picked up then in Ireland. He had an open 
mind. One thing more. He had already discovered Words- 
worth's *' We are Seven " at a time when the very few 
people who had heard of Wordsworth, heard only to laugh. 
He had an independent mind. 

The " great school " mentioned above was the Manches- 
ter Grammar School, which had been chosen by his guar- 
dians because it was entitled to certain scholarships at 
Oxford. De Quincey despised the master and hated the 
school. He declared that his health was being under- 
mined for lack of exercise, that he Avas quite 2')repared to 
go up to Oxford. The guardians, with their eyes on the 
scholarship, rejected all appeals for removal. He asked 
Lady Carbery to lend him five guineas to help out the 
two he had left. She sent him ten. Then De Quincey 
ran away. 

"I waited until I saw llie trunk placed on a wheelbarrow, and on 
its road to the carrier's ; then, ' with Providence my guide,' I set off 
on foot, carrying a small parcel, with some articles of dress, under 
my arm ; a favourite Englisli poet in one pocket, and a small 12mo 
volume, containing about nine plays of Euripides, in the otlier." * 

When De Quincey ran away at seventeen, he was in 
thought a man. In practical experience he was neither 
then nor ever afterward more than a child. But would 
Wordsworth treat him as a man or as a runaway school- 
boy ? Sorrowfully inclining to the latter view, he gave 

' Con f 68810718. 



xii INTRODUCTION 

lip his plan of going straight to the Lakes, and went wan- 
dering in Wales. ISTo one should read the account of 
these years of transition anywhere else than in De Quin- 
cey's own "Confessions." The mere facts are compara- 
tively insignificant. He slept much out of doors; he 
wrote letters for bed or food; he studied German with a 
chance acquaintance; he finally went up to London in the 
hope of raising money on his prospects. In London he 
applied to many Jewish money-lenders in vain. His money 
gone, he walked the streets, sleeping in one of the empty 
rooms of a house where a ^oettifogging lawyer carried on 
some obscure and doubtful business. Hunger and expos- 
ure undermined his constitution and gave him a chronic 
malady of the stomach. None too soon came the reconcil- 
iation with the guardians from Avhom he had been hiding. 
It was arranged that he should live at the university on 
£100 a year. 

Nothing in the whole life of De Quincey makes less 
impression upon his readers, or seems to have made less 
impression upon himself, than Oxford. He entered 
Worcester College, December 17, 1803, and his name 
remained on the books till 1810; but he might as well 
have been reading in any other quiet place. He studied 
ancient philosophy, German literature, and metaphysics. 
He dij)ped into Hebrew with a German named Schwartz- 
burg; he was known to a few as brilliant in conversation. 
In 1808 he left without a degree; and the explanations of 
this, both his own and those advanced by his friends and 
biographers, tend only to strengthen the impression that 
De Quincey was a dilettante rather than a scholar. This 
period appears among his imaginative reminiscences only 
in " The English Mail Coach." He dreams, not of the old 
colleges, the gardens, the river, Magdalen tower — anything 
that has passed into the heart of any other man of letters 
— but of the coach that took him to London, of the '^ glory 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

of motion," the " under-sense of indefinite danger/' " the 
conscious presence of a central intellect in the midst of 
vast distances." Xothing could better show his aloofness. 
Before definitely leaving Oxford, De Quincey had corres- 
ponded at some length with Wordsworth, and had visited 
Coleridge and Southey. While he was lingering undecided 
in London, reading a little law, meeting men of letters, 
he began the systematic use of opium. One of his chief 
pleasures was to take opium before going to the opera. 

"A chorus, etc., of elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in 
a piece of arras work, the whole of ray past life — not as if recalled 
by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music; 
no longer painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its incidents 
removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction, and its passions 
exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for five 
shillings. And over and above the music of the stage and the orches- 
tra, I had all around me, in the intervals of the performance, the 
music of the Italian language talked by Italian women — for the gal- 
lery was usually crowded with Italians; and I listened with a pleas- 
ure such as that with which Weld the traveller lay and listened, in 
Canada, to the sweet laughter of Indian women ; for the less you 
understand of a language, the more sensible you are to the melody 
or harshness of its sounds." ^ 

Opium was used also to heighten the jileasure of min- 
gling with the London crowd on Saturday night. 

" For the sake, therefore, of witnessing upon as large a scale as 
possible a spectacle with whicli my sympathy was so entire, I used 
often on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander fortli, 
without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the 
markets and other parts of London to which the poor resort of a 
Saturday night for laying out their wages. Many a family party, 
consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his chil- 
dren, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways and 
means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of household 
articles."'" 

i Confessions, "^ Ibid. 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

His attitude of mind at this time, and, to some extent^ 
throughout his life, appears significantly in the following: 

"I, whose disease it was to meditate too much, and to observe too 
little, and who, upon my first entrance at college, was nearly falling 
into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings 
which I had witnessed in London, was sulRciently aware of the ten- 
dencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. I 
was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old legend, had 
entered the cave of Trophonius ; and the remedies I sought were to 
force myself into society, and to keep my understanding in continual 
activity upon matters of science. But for these remedies I should 
certainly have become hypochondriacally melancholy. In after years, 
however, when my cheerfulness was more fully re-established, I 
yielded to my natural inclination for a solitary life. And, at that 
time, I often fell into these reveries upon taking opium; and more 
than once it has happened to me, on a summer night, when I have 
been at an open window, in a room from which I could overlook the 
sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the great town 

of L , at about the same distance, that I have sat from sunset to 

sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to move. " * 

From this unsettled life De Quincey roused himself to 
go where he had been strongly drawn since boyhood — to 
the Westmoreland Lakes and the society of those poets 
who have since been grouped as the Lake School. Cole- 
ridge, Southey, and, foremost of all, AVordsworth, were 
seeking to establish in England a kind of poetry essen- 
tially different from the poetry of the eighteenth century. 
The difference appears most strikingly in two character- 
istics. The eighteenth century preferred the interests of 
men and women in the city, and held to a somewhat for- 
mal and conventional expression. Wordsworth and his 
followers preached and practised a " return to nature," 
that is, a return to the simpler interests of country people, 
to the love of scenery apart from men and women, and to 
a mory direct and natural expression. Again, the eighteenth 

' Confessions. 



INTRODUCTION XV 

century discouraged imagination, whereas imagination was 
made by these reformers ahnosfc the touchstone of true 
poetry. Though all the great poets of the time caught 
the spirit of this change, the critics and the public were so 
slow in following them that for some years the Lake School 
was a butt of ridicule. It was with the ardour of a disci- 
ple, then, that De Quincey, at the age of twenty-four, 
went to be near his heroes of literature. After living for 
some time with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, he took a 
lease of their cottage when they removed to a larger one, 
filled it with books, and spent about ten years in reading, 
playing with the Wordsworth children, walking and talk- 
ing to his heart's content with the poets themselves. lie 
thus describes the Vale of Grasmere: 

" Once I absolutely went forwards from Coniston to the very gorge 
of Hammerscar, from which the whole Vale of Grasmere suddenly 
breaks upon the view in a style of almost theatrical surprise, with 
its lovely valley stretching before the eye in the distance, the lake 
lying immediately below, with its solemn, ark-like island of four and 
a half acres in size seemingly floating on its surface, and its exquisite 
outline on the opposite shore, revealing all its little bays and wild 
sylvan margin, feathered to the edge with wild flowers and ferns. 
In one quarter, a little wood stretching for about half a mile towards 
the outlet of the lake ; more directly in opposition to the spectator, 
a few green fields ; and beyond them, just two bowshots from the 
water, a little white cottage gleaming from the midst of trees, with 
a vast and seemingly never-ending series of ascents rising above it 
to the height of more than three thousand feet." * 

The interior of the cottage is described in the " Confes- 
sions " : 

" Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more 
than seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambi- 
tiously styled in ray family the drawing-room ; but being contrived 
' a double debt to pay,' it is also, and more justly, termed the library, 

^Autobiographic Sketches, ii., 234. 



xvi INTRODUCTION- 

for it happens that books are the only article of property in which 1 
am richer than my neighbours. Of these I have about five thousand, 
collected gradually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, 
put as many as you can into this room. Make it populous with 
books ; and, furthermore, i)aint me a good fire ; and furniture plain 
and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And 
near the fire paint me a tea-table ; and (as it is clear that no creature 
can come to see one such a stormy night) place only two cups and 
saucers on the tea-tray ; and if you know how to paint such a thing 
symbolically, or otherwise, paint me an eternal tea-pot — eternal d 
parte ante, and a parte post — for I usually drink tea from eight 
o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning. . . . The next 
article brought forward should naturally be myself — a picture of the 
Opium-eater, with his ' little golden receptacle of the pernicious 
drug ' lying beside him on the table. . . . No ; you may as 
well paint the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, 
and as much like a wine-decanter as possible. Into this you may 
put a quart of ruby-colored laudanum ; that, and a book of German 
Metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in 
the neighbourhood." 

Literary leisure lias rarely been more perfectly realized. 
To most people, indeed to his own family, he was a recluse; 
but to his few intimates he was the most delightful and 
profitable of companions. Professor Wilson, who was 
twice 13e Quincey's size, and differed correspondingly in 
tastes, loved him dearly. The giant and the dwarf used 
to ramble interminably together, especially at night. 
These bachelor habits were hardly modified when, in 
1816, De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, daughter of 
a neighbouring farmer. The marriage led him to curb his 
alarming consumption of opium, and combined with his 
habit of giving money away recklessly to force him into 
writing for a living. But after a few magazine articles, 
an important examination of Kicardo's jiolitical economy, 
followed by some original work on the same subject, and a 
futile attempt to edit a country paper, he relapsed into 
opium depression. It required a supreme effort of will 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

and the positive need of his wife and children finally to 
rouse him to systematic effort. 

In 1821 De Quincey went to live in London as a regular 
writer for the new London Magazine, just -established by 
the publishers Taylor and Hesscy. At their table he met 
the London literary men of the day, especially Lamb and 
Hood; and in their magazine appeared the " Confessions of 
an English Opium -Eater," which made him famous. 
Thus he was thirty-six when he came before the public. 
Indeed, the public might never have heard of him at all 
but for his' need of money. From this time on anecdotes 
thicken about the little figure of the Oiiium-Eater. The 
two things that struck every one most were his wonderful 
conversation and the confusion in which he worked. Here 
is a note by Hood: 

" When it was my frequent and agreeable duty to call on Mr. de 
Quincey . . . and I have found him at home, quite at home, in 
the midst of a German Ocean of literature in a storm, flooding all 
the floor, the tables, billows of books tossing, tumbling, surging 
open, on such occasions I have willingly listened by the hour whilst 
the philosopher, standing with his eyes fixed on one side of the room, 
seemed to be less speaking than reading from a ' handwriting on the 
Ayall.' Xow and then he would diverge, for a Scotch mile or two, to 
the right or left, till I was tempted to inquire with Peregrine in 
John Bull, ' Do you never deviate ? ' but he always came safely 
back to the point where he had left, not lost the scent, and thence 
hunted his topic to the end." * 

During his six or seven years' residence in London De 
Quincey's magazine-writing consisted mainly of essays on 
German and English literature and philosophy, and of 
translations from the German; but his range was always 
very wide. On political economy and history he wrote with 
assurance; on many other subjects with fluency. Gras- 

^Hood, Literary Reminiscences (quoted by Hogg, De Quincey and 
his Friends,-^. 239). 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

mere he visited rarely; and in 1828 a growing connection 
with BlackivoocVs Magazine, through his old friend Pro- 
fessor Wilson, led to the removal of the whole family to 
Edinburgh. 

The Edinburgh period, though essentially one in liter- 
ary activity, is divided into two parts by other considera- 
tions. During the first third the family lived together in 
town. In 1835 the elder son, a promising boy of eighteen, 
died of brain fever. In 1837, the year in wdiich "The 
Kevolt of the Tartars " was w^ritten, Mrs. De Quincey died. 
During the last two thirds. Do Quincey had a cottage at 
Lasswade, not far from town, for the benefit of his chil- 
dren. His eldest daughter took charge of the household, 
and De Quincey, sometimes with them, sometimes in Edin- 
burgh lodgings, sometimes in Glasgow, continued to study 
and wa-ite in seclusion till his death in 1859. lie was now 
famous on both sides of the Atlantic. But though he 
continued to write without apparent flagging, and though 
his conversation continued to enchant the few who felt its 
spell, it is impossible not to see that his afflictions and the 
ultimate eifects of opium had exaggerated his eccentricities 
into something grotesque and ^^itiable. He was a slovenly 
old man, unstrung, often confused. Brilliant ho was still, 
but by flashes; gentle and courteous he could not help 
being, but he had forgotten how to dress, and he feared 
society. Through his last years there is a painful groping, 
a pathetic incompetence. But his power of reflection and 
expression survived all loss of practical efficiency. That 
died last. At the eud, as at the beginning, he w^as *'au 
intellectual creature." 

''Intellectual creature," indeed, is a phrase that sums 
up what in the man's life is most memorable. He was 
purely a man of letters. Macaulay gave years to politics; 
Scott was anxious to found estates and a noble family; but 
all De Quincey cared for Avas first reading and thinking. 



INTRODUCTION xix 

and secondarily talking and writing. His was an inner 
life, lie never travelled farther than Ireland, and after 
his coming to (Irasmere the externals of his life are insig- 
nificant. A life so self-centred was, of necessity, egotist- 
ical, not in vulgar vanity and selfishness, but in habitual 
spinning out of himself. But, what is more important, it 
was above all imaginative, moving in the world of art rather 
than in the world of fact, loving music, speculation, 
mystery. 

It is only to look upon these traits from another side to 
add that he was abstracted, eccentric, incompetent in 
every-day matters. " I have just set my hair on fire," ho 
remarks casually in a letter to his publisher. During the 
Edinburgh period his lodgings became, as he expressed it, 
*• snowed up ; " that is, the confusion of books and papers 
reached the point of crowding out the author. His rem- 
edy was very simple. He locked the door, took other lodg- 
ings, and began afresh. AVhen one knows that this hap- 
pened more than once, it is easier to believe the anecdotes 
current about this period. 

"His clothes had generally a look of extreme a£?e, and also of 
having been made for a person somewhat larger than himself. I 
believe the real cause of this was that he liad got much thinner in 
those later years, whilst he wore, and did wear, I suppose till the 
end of his life, the clothes that had been made for him years before. 
I have sometimes seen appearances about him of a shirt and shirt- 
collar, but usually there were no indications of these articles of 
dress. When I came to visit him in his lod<^ings, I saw him in all 
stages of costume ; sometimes he would come in to me from his bed- 
room to his parlour, as on this occasion, with shoes, but no stockings, 
and sometimes with stockings, but no shoes. When in bed, where I 
also saw him from time to time, he wore a large jacket — not exactly 
an under-jackct, but a jacket made in the form of a coat, of white 
flannel ; somethinj^ like a cricketer's coat in fact. In the street his 
appearance was equally singular. lie walked with considerable 
rapidity (he said walking was the only athletic exercise in which he 
had ever e«celled) and with an odd, one-sided, and yet straight- 



XX INTRODUCTION 

forward motion, moving his legs only, and neither his arms, head, 
Ror any other part of his body — like Wordsworth's cloud — 

'Moving altogether, if he moved ut all.' 

His hat, which had the antedihivian aspect characteristic of the rest 
of his clothes, was generally stuck on the back of his head, and no 
one who ever met that antiquated figure, with that strangely dreamy 
and intellectual face, working its way rapidly, and with an oddly 
deferential air, through any of the streets of Edinburgh — a sight 
certainly by no means common, for he was very seldom to be seen in 
town — could ever forget it. He was very fond of walking, but gen- 
erally his walks were merely into town to his publisher's office (Mr. 
Hogg's, then in Nicolson Street) and back again to Lasswade. Till 
he was nearly seventy he took this walk — one of twelve miles — 
without inconvenience." ^ 

"Hoofed by a huge wide-awake, which makes his tiny figure look 
like the stalk of some great fungus, with a lantern of more than 
common dimensions in his hand, away he goes down the wooded 
path, up the steep bank, along the brawling stream, and across the 
waterfall — and ever as he goes there comes from him a continued 
stream of talk, concerning the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and 
other kindred matters. Surely if we two were seen by any human 
eyes, it must have been supposed that some gnome, or troll, or kel- 
pie, was luring the listener to his doom. The worst of such affairs 
as tliis, was the consciousness that, when left, the old man would 
continue walking on until, weariness overcoming him, he would take 
his rest, wherever that happened, like some poor mendicant. He 
used to denounce, with his most fervid eloquence, that barbarous and 
brutal provision of the law of England, which rendered sleeping in 
the open air an act of vagrancy, and so punishable, if the sleeper 
could not give a satisfactory account of himself — a thing which 
Papaverius never could give under any circumstances." ^ 

" For instance, those who knew him a little might call him a loose 
man in money mattei's ; those who knew hiin closer laughed at the 
idea of coupling any notion of pecuniary or other like responsibility 
with his nature. You might as well attack the character of the 
nightingale, which nuiy have nipped up your five-pound note and 

'J. R. Findlav {Hogg, ibid,, p. 129). 

'^John Hill Burton, The Booh Ilunter (chapter entitled "Papa- 
verius," quoted by Hogg, ibid., p. 2o-l). 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

torn it into shreds to serve as nest-building material. Only immedi- 
ate, craving necessities could ever extract from him an acknowledg- 
ment of the common vulgar agencies by which men subsist in civil- 
ised society , and only while the necessity lasted did the acknowledg- 
ment exist. Take just one example, which will render this clearer 
than any generalities. lie arrives very late at a friend's door, and 
on gaining admission — a process in which he often endured impedi- 
ments — he represents with his usual silver voice and measured 
rhetoric the absolute necessity of his being then and there invested 
with a sum of money in the current coin of the realm, the amount 
limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he very freely 
states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or fancying he 
discovers, signs that his eloquence is likely to be unproductive, he is 
fortunately reminded that, should there be any difficulty in connec- 
tion with security for the repayment of the loan, he is at that moment 
in possession of a document, which he is prepared to deposit with 
the lender — a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to remove a 
feeling of anxiety which the most prudent person could experience 
in the circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which de- 
velops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable 
possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled 
bit of paper, and spreads it out — a fifty-pound bank-note ! The 
friend, who knew him well, was of opinion that, had he, on deliver- 
ing over the seven shillings and sixpence, received the bank-note, 
he would never have heard anything more of the transaction from 
the other party," ^ 



Of course it is easy to exaggerate the impression of De 
Quincey's abstraction. He read the papers and was inter- 
ested in current events, though he was prone to reflect 
away from the facts. His conversation, too, was a strong 
link between him and his fellows. But though this often 
started among current events, or even in commonplaces, 
it was almost sure to become imaginative, speculative, 
sometimes almost rhapsodic. This was the man's great 
charm, the charm that attached to him a brilliant follow- 



* John Hill Burton, The Booh Hunter (chapter entitled *' Pap£ 
verius," quoted by Hogg, ihid., p. 255). 



xxi i IN TROD UCTION 

ing and a romantic interest, heightening his fame to this 
day. His essay on " Conversation " shows his ideals and 
gives some hint of his power. AVhat he was in congenial 
company appears in the following : 

" He did not quite, as Burton had told me he would do, talk maga- 
zine articles, but the literary habit was notable, though not in the 
least obtrusive, in all his talk. One effect of this was somewhat trying 
to an inexperienced listener; for when in the flow of his conversation 
he came to the close of one of his beautifully rounded and balanced 
paragraphs, he would pause in order to allow you to have your say, 
with the result sometimes of rather taking one aback, especially as 
the subject of conversation often seemed to have been brought, by 
his conduct of it, to its complete and legitimate conclusion. The 
listener was apt to feel that he had perorated rather than paused. 
In his mode of conversing, as in everything else, his courtesy of 
manner was observable. He never monopolised talk, allowed every 
one to have a fair chance, and listened with respectful patience to 
the most commonplace remarks from any one present. The fact 
that any one was, for the time, a member of the company in which 
he also happened to be, evidently in his eyes entitled the speaker to 
all consideration and respect. But he had a just horror of bores, 
and carefully avoided them." ^ 

"His voice was extraordinary; it came as if from dreamland ; but 
ic was the most musical and impressive of voices. In convivial life, 
wnat then seemed to me the most remarkable trait of De Quincey's 
cnaracter, was the power he possessed of easily changing the tone of 
ordinary thought and conversation into that of his own dreamland, 
till his auditors, with wonder, found themselves moving pleasantly 
along with him in a sphere of which they might have heard and read, 
perhaps, but which had ever appeared to them inaccessible, and far, 
far away. Seeing that he was always good-natured and social, he 
would take part, at commencement, in any sort of tattle or twaddle. 
The talk might be of 'beeves,' and he could grapple with them if 
expected to do so, but his musical cadences were not in keeping with 
such work, and in a few minutes (not without some strictly logical 
sequence) he could escape at will from beeves to butterflies, and 
thence to the soul's immortality; to Plato, and Kant, and Schelling, 
and Fichte; to Milton's early years, and Shakespeare's sonnets; to 

»J. R. Findlay, ihid., p. 127. 



INTRODUCTION xxiii 

Wordsworth and Coleridge; to Homer and JEschylus; to S't. Thomas 
of Aquin, St. Basil, and St. Chrysostom. But he by no means ex- 
cluded themes from real life, according to his view of that life, but 
would recount profound mysteries from his own experiences — visions 
that had come over him in his loneliest walks among the mountains, 
and passages within his own personal knowledge, illustrating, if not 
proving, the doctrines of dreams, of warnings, of second sight, and 
mesmerism. And whatever the subject might be, every one of his 
sentences (or of his chapters, I might say) was woven into the most 
perfect logical texture, and uttered in a tone of sustained melody." ^ 
"Presently the flood of talk passes forth from them, free, clear, 
and continuous — never rising into declamation, never losing a cer- 
tain mellow earnestness, and all consisting of sentences as exqui- 
sitely jointed together as if they were destined to challenge the criti- 
cism of the remotest posterity. Still the hours stride over each 
other, and still flows on the stream of gentle rhetoric, as if it were 
labitur et labetur in omne voluhilis cevum. It is now far into the 
night, and slight hints and suggestions are propagated about sepa- 
ration and home-going. The topic starts new ideas on the progress 
of civilisation, the effect of habit on man in all ages, and the power 
of the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the special, 
he could testify to the inconvenience of late hours; for, was it not 
the other night that, coming t6 what was, or what he believed to be, 
his own door, he knocked and knocked, but the old woman within 
either couldn't or wouldn't hear him, so he scrambled over a wall, 
and having taken his repose in a furrow, was able to testify to the 
extreme unpleasantness of such a couch. The predial groove might 
indeed nourish kindly the infant seeds and shoots of the peculiar 
vegetable to which it was appropriated, but was not a comfortable 
place of repose for adult man."* 

Perhaps, indeed, he found his most natural expression in 
talking rather than in writing, and certainly his writing 
has the discursive character of talk. 

With the exception of "The Logic of Political Econ- 
omy" and the unimportant novel " Klosterheim," De 
Quincey's Avork consists entirely of articles for the reviews. 

* R. P. Gillies, Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, ibid., p. 241. 

* John Hill Burton, The Book Hunter, ibid., p. 252, 



xxiv INTRODUCTION 

These cover a very great range of subjects,^ following his 
reading, which was wide rather than deep. He made preten- 
sions to scholarship in many fields, but he seems never to 
have carried on any long and connected research. He was 
bookish ; he preferred reading to writing, his work sometimes 
"smells of the lamp," and he delights in pedantic foot-notes; 
but he cannot, except in the precision of his language, be 
called scholarly. This characteristic of his work is typical 
both of his habit of mind and of his time. 

As a critic his value is perhaps overestimated. On the one 
hand, he shares with Coleridge and Carlyle the credit of intro- 
ducing English readers to German literature and philosophy. 
He was also among the first to appreciate the new poetry of 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, and to contend for its just place in 
literature. On the other hand, he failed to appreciate French 
literature, slighted Goethe, scorned Crabbe, preferred Dickens 
to Thackeray, and ventured to attack the Republic of Plato. 
The ability to give the average reader a more intelligent in- 
terest in literature, and to lead him toward culture, though 
it is less evident than in Macaulay and Hazlitt, is proved 
by his illuminative essay " On the Knocking at the Gate in 
Macbeth." 

In any case De Quincey's value as a critic is not the 
measure of his excellence. His most popular and interesting 
works, the works by which he himself set most store, are those 
pieces of imaginative reminiscence beginning with the " Con- 
fessions of an English Opium-Eater," and proceeding through 
the "Suspiria de Profundis" (including "Levana," "Savan- 
nah-la-Mar," etc.), and the "Autobiographic Sketches," to 
"The English Mail-Coach." Not only did these catch the 

1 For classification, see De Quincey's general preface to his own collec- 
tive edition {Selections, Grave and Gay, etc., Edinburgh, James Hogg, 
1853-60) ; Professor Masson's Life and his revised Edinburgh edition ; Dr. 
Hodgson's Genius of De Quinccy {Outcast Essays, reprinted in Hogg's 
De Quincey and his Friends), and Professor Turk's introduction {Selections, 
etc., v.). 



INTRODUCTION xxv 

taste of the time ; ^ they also hold a peculiar place in English 
literature. 

11. De Quincey's Literary Method 

(See the account of the composition and revision of "The English 
Mail-Coach," at page 106.) 

1. De Quincey^s Handling of the Essay Form 

The literary form of these pieces is De Quincey's habitual 
form, the essay. Like Macaulay, Carlyle, Lowell, like Addi- 
son, Swift, and Johnson in the previous century, he was an 
essayist. The mere mention of these well-known users of 
the essay form reminds us that it has been used most vari- 
ously. An essay by Macaulay has little resemblance to an 
essay by Lamb ; and neither of them resembles an essay by 
Carlyle. In fact, the term essay is applied rather largely and 
loosely. Of all the names of literary forms it is the least 
definite, because there is a comparative lack of definiteness in 
the form itself Story, speech, drama, — each of these terms 
conveys at once a clear notion of the form of the piece to 
which it is applied. But to say that a piece is an essay does 
not give so definite an idea of what it is like. Still, the term 
has a meaning, which, though wide, is sufficiently clear. For 
the essay form, though less fixed than the others, is still 
recognisable as a literary form, and has an important place in 
literature. 

An essay deals with ideas. Unlike a story or a drama, it 
gives, instead of the actions and words that we see and hear, 
reflections for our thought. An essay is not a reflection of 
life, but a reflection on life. It tries to tell what things 
mean, — to explain their significance, to give clues by which 
we may see the relation of one idea to another, and so to 

1 Note, for instance, some of Hawthorne's shorter pieces ; and, later, 
Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor and Dream Life. 



xxvi INTRODUCTION 

classify and organise our knowledge, — in a word, to explain. 
Thus De Quincey's "Joan of Arc" aims, not to tell the thrill- 
ing story of her life, but ' to show her place in history, to 
suggest the significance of her suffering, to explain what her 
life means. For the object of an essay is to reach some 
underlying ideas. 

This aim of the essay is most commonly pursued by an 
orderly development through a logical series of paragraphs. 
Each paragraph is a stage of thought, fitted to its place, 
doing its part toward making a clear and sound whole. In its 
structure, that is, an essay is commonly like a speech. It may, 
indeed, be less rigidly held to a single logical line, because it 
is not addressed to any single audience; but its order is 
usually a logical order, and its paragraphs are usually very 
like the paragraphs of a speech. In this regard, an essay by 
Matthew Arnold is like a speech by Burke, an essay by Bacon 
like a speech by St. Paul. In either case alike, the line of 
thought may be laid bare by summing up each paragraph in 
a sentence and reading these sentences consecutively. 

But though this is the common method of the essay, it 
is not the only method. It is Macaulay's method, but not 
De Quincey's. For the essay form may also be used to set 
forth ideas not so much by orderly explanation as by sugges- 
tions addressed to the imagination. Instead of developing 
his thought logically, as a teacher explains to a class, the 
essayist may suggest it more imaginatively, by a larger use of 
descriptive appeal. This latter way was always followed by 
De Quincey's contemporaries Lamb and Hazlitt ; it was often 
used by Carlyle and Lowell, and occasionally by many other 
essayists. Ideally an essay combines the two methods ; it 
has both logical order to satisfy the reason, and descriptive 
appeal to stimulate the imagination. And some of the best 
essays owe their eminence to just this happy combination. 
But more usually an author will be found so strongly to prefer 
one method that he neglects the other. De Quincey cared so 



INTRODUCTION xxvii 

much more for appeal to the imagination that he paid little 
Jieed to logical order. In analysis, he does, indeed, show 
logical power ; but in synthesis, in composition, he commonly 
disregards logical development, and devotes himself exclusively 
to awakening the reader's imagination. 

These two methods of composing an essay, the logical and 
the suggestive, correspond roughly to De Quincey's own bril- 
liant division of literature into " the literature of knowledge " 
and "the literature of power." "The function of the first," 
he says, " is to teach ; the function of the second is to move : 
the first is a rudder, the second an oar or sail. The first 
speaks to the mej-e discursive understanding ; the second 
speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understand- 
ing or reason, but always through afiections of pleasure and 
sympathy" {Essay on Pope). 

But it will not do to think of these two ideals as totally 
distinct. To some extfent, the latter must always depend 
on the former; the transmission of the "power" will be 
checked by imperfect transmission of the "knowledge"; the 
"sail" flaps without a "rudder." It is just here that De 
Quincey's method has an essential weakness. He had not 
only a strong predilection for "the literature of power," but 
also a constitutional incapacity for satisfying the demands of 
"the literature of knowledge." It is an evident defect, as 
evident as his many excellences, that he cannot convey infor- 
mation in any clear order. His composition is not merely 
informal and suggestive, like Lamb's and Hazlitt's ; it is 
actually incoherent. Even where he indicates a line of 
thought, he never hesitates to deviate from it, or even to 
abandon it altogether. In the first volume of his " Autobio- 
graphic Sketches," for example, the piece entitled "The Na- 
tion of London," opens as follows, the parentheses indicating 
digressions : 

I. London exercises a visible attraction throughout the 
kingdom (two-page foot-note on ancient Rome). 



xxviii INTRODUCTION 

II. Our approach was through rural suburbs, not by any 
great road [On the great roads how different the approach ! 
(1) in the premonitions of the metropoKs (note on trepidation 
and agitation), (2) in the sense of losing one's identity in the 
throng — two pages]. 

III. I remember the awe of our arrival. 

IV. What should we go to seel There were so many 
things to see that we could decide on nothing. [I have had 
in my life three great disappointments (1) in a painting of 
Cape Horn (just as people have been disappointed (though, 
by the way, less reasonably) in the view from Mount Etna, 
one page) ; (2) in Garrick's farewell ; (3) in the inauguration 
of George IV. (the very idea of Garrick's farewell was as ab- 
surd as our present dilemma — one page)]. 

In hke manner, " The English Mail-Coach " is made up of 
disconnected parts. Section I breaks off abruptly ; and sec- 
tion II is virtually another essay (see page lOG). The same 
kind of breach is evident between the two parts of the essay 
on " Conversation." In " Joan of Arc " the first two para- 
graphs and the last three are an eloquent reverie, con&titute 
a fairly unified whole, and contain most of the essay's virtue. 
But between these two groups is inserted a long review of 
Michelet's history, perhaps written at a different time, and 
certainly interrupting and disturbing the impression of the 
rest. Nor do these ill-matched parts show much care for co- 
herence within themselves. There is little real connection in 
" The English Mail-Coach " between the two parts of Section 
I, and still less within its first part. The long interpolation 
in " Joan of Arc " follows no distinct order. To sum up each 
paragraph in a sentence, as is done above for the " Autobi- 
ographic Sketches " is to reveal De Quincey's wide and care- 
less rambling. 

This habit of corkscrewing through an essay is due some- 
what to the fact that from such magazine articles the editors 
and their readers expected, not the development of a definite 



INTRODUCTION xxix 

line of thought on a fixed subject, but a stream of literary 
talk. Often, in fact, there is, properly speaking, no subject. 
One of these articles is simply so many pages of reminiscence 
or discussion, brought to a graceful close when the author 
was tired, or the editor had no more space. But the habit is 
due mainly to De Quincey's vivid imagination. One picture 
called up another, until sometimes his very strength in sug- 
gestion betrayed him into weakness in composition. 

To whatever due, this discursive habit is De Quincey's great 
fault — a fault that runs through most of his work. What 
was pardonable in reminiscence became unpardonable in other 
essays. It is not enough to say that he never lost his way, 
that he eventually came back to the point, or even that the 
digressions are often delightful in themselves. There is no 
denying the grave defect in art. 

To cover this fault, De Quincey makes large use of connec- 
tive words. Real connection of thought he does without ; but 
he is careful of apparent connection, that is of connectives. 
Though paragraph III (pages 42-44) of " The English Mail- 
Coach " lacks the unity of a single stage of thought, deviat- 
ing from Oxford to the social distinctions between " outsides " 
and "insides," the opening words of paragraph IV tie these 
two ideas together : " Such being, at that time, the usage of 
mail-coaches, what was to be done by us of young Oxford ? '' 
"Great wits jump," begins paragraph VI (page 46). "The 
very same idea had not long before struck the celestial intel- 
lect of China." "I mention this little incident," begins para- 
graph XII (page 53) "for its connection with what followed." 
In these cases, and in general, as may be proved by further 
examination, there is not so much an internal connection of 
ideas as a mere superficial connection of words. 

De Quincey's method, then, was directed toward engaging 
not so much the reader's reasoning and reflection as the 
reader's imagination. The value of his essays is not for in- 
formation, but for suggestion. In fact, as subject-matter De 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

Quincey's essays are rarely of any importance. The central 
incident of " The English Mail-Coach " is very slight. Stated 
in its bare facts, it is even trivial. A pair of lovers, driving 
at night, just escaped being upset by a mail-coach. No 
physical harm was done ; but the young lady was agitated- 
These commonplace facts worked on De Quincey's imagina- 
tion ; and he has made them work on ours. "The incident, 
so memorable ... by its features of horror, and so scenical by 
its grouping for the eye . . . furnished the text for this reverie " 
(page 73). In "Joan of Arc" and in "The Revolt of the 
Tartars " the facts are of great importance for themselves. 
They have the larger historical significance. But De Quin- 
cey's method is the same. In spite of his pretence of re- 
search, he took no pains to determine what were the facts. 
He even fell at times into foolish errors. Nor did he take 
pains to develop from the facts any clear line of thought. He 
simpiy and solely cared to realize an imaginative conception, 
to body forth a kind of vision. Bergmann's narrative of the 
flight of a Tartar tribe suggested to his imagination vivkl 
pictures of great empires, vast distances, unspeakable horror, 
and misery. These pictures are the basis and strength of 
"The Revolt of the Tartars." All the rest is subsidiary, — 
sometimes striking or penetrative, sometimes mistaken or ab- 
surd, but essentially subsidiary. In short, the piece is not so 
much history as poetry. The same method he applied to the 
story of Joan of Arc. In most of De Quincey's work, indeed 
in all his characteristic w^ork, the fact is merely a point of de- 
parture, "the text for this reverie " ; the imagination is all. 

De Quincey's work stands or falls, then, by its imaginative 
effects. He himself conceived it as a kind of prose-poetry, 
calling it " impassioned prose " (see below, page xxxiv). This 
is no small ambition. Its success is measured by its power to 
hold the reader, to keep him under the spell. Naturally, 
therefore, his most successful pieces, such as " Levana," and 
"Savannah-la-Mar," are short. Emotional excitement of the 



INTRODUCTION xxxi 

imagination is very difficult to sustain. Even Poe, who was a 
master of this art, regarded as one of its essentials brevity. 
De Quincey's longer pieces fail to sustain the emotion. They 
rise; but presently they lapse or even fall. It is not his 
"Joan of Arc " as a whole that keeps us on the heights ; it is 
the opening and the close, and a passage or two between. So 
the successive variations on the " Dream-Fugue " move us, 
not as the climax of an emotional scale, but as separate short 
flights. Perhaps from the very nature of his attempt, any of 
De Quincey's long essays seems uneven and fitful. Discarding 
the support of logical form, and venturing as it were into the 
air, he could rise and soar, but he could not long stay up. 

2. De Quincey's Paragraphs. 

The method of the whole of course affects the details. The 
thought is not conducted by such stages as would make logi- 
cally clear paragraphs. The first paragraph of " Joan of Arc " 
can hardly be regarded as a logical unit. Rather it seems to 
be three paragraphs, the first ending " her feet were dust," the 
second ending " deaf for five centuries." But if De Quincey's 
paragraphs are not always logically unified, they are none the 
less composed usually with clear method and singular skill. 
For De Quincey paid far more attention to the details of 
structure than to the plan of the whole (see above). His 
prose is to French prose somewhat as an English cathedral is 
to a French cathedral. The English work often shows the 
highest artistic sense in detail. It is brilliant or grand or 
lovely in porch or arch or tower ; but it has not the strength 
and beauty of the whole, the entirety of Amiens. The opening 
of "Joan of Arc" is like the noble porch of Peterborough; 
and the paragraphs that follow are like the lower nave be- 
hind it. 

How well De Quincey understood the development of a 
paragraph is plain from his abundant variety of means. 
The opening paragraph of "Joan of Arc" is developed by 



xxxii INTR OD UC TION 

comparison and contrast; the ninth paragraph (page 11) by 
picturesque instances; the twenty-eighth (page 73) of "The 
English Mail-Coach " by progressive iteration of a single sen- 
tence. His copiousness in this regard is worth the study of 
any one who wishes to achieve practically what the old rheto- 
rics call "amplification." No less noteworthy is his skill in 
connectives (see page xxix). Few authors show so great a 
variety of conjunctions. Beside him Macaulay is poor. 
Whereas Macaulay will make shift for pages with "and" and 
"but," De Quincey shows in the first pages of "The English 
Mail-Coach " "therefore," "yet," "now," "finally," "in fact," 
"on the contrary," "again"; and this is but a tithe of his 
list. Nor are conjunctions his favourite connectives. Rather 
he prefers the demonstratives, "this," "that," "here," etc., 
or the repetition of an emphatic word. The remarkable 
twenty-eighth paragraph of "The English Mail-Coach" is 
knit throughout by the iteration of the word dream. The 
first paragraph of " Joan of Arc " marks the theme of the 
whole essay by the epithets successively applied to the Maid 
• — "poor shepherd girl," "gentle girl," "poor forsaken girl," 
" pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl," " daughter of Domr^my," 
"poor shepherd girl," "pure creature," " holy child " ; and at 
the same time by phrases successively indicating her tragic 
destiny. In development and in connection De Quincey 's 
paragraphs show a high technical skill. 

3. De Quincey' s Sentences. 

No less careful and sure are his sentences. Most of the 
effects of sentence arrangement that are taught in text-books 
of rhetoric are exemplified in these two essays. Through this 
skilful variety appears a distinct preference for sentences 
rather long and deliberate. He was too reflective, too fond of 
fine distinctions and qualifications, to cultivate the loose, brisk 
style of disconnected short sentences. Even in descriptive or 
humorous passages, as at page 48, he rarely shortens his 



INTRODUCTION xxxiii 

stride. The long involved sentence on page 20 was even 
longer and more loose in the original magazine article. It 
read: — "Joanna's history bisects ... in the latter; — 
this might have been done — it might have been communicated 
to a fellow-prisoner, or a confessor, by Joanna herself, in the 
same way that Virgil has contrived to acquaint the reader, 
through the hero's mouth, with earlier adventures that, if told 
by the poet speaking in his own person, would have destroyed 
the unity of his fable." But his favourite form was the periodic 
or suspended sentence: "We, the most aristocratic of people, 
who were addicted to the practice of looking down supercili- 
ously even upon the insides themselves as often very question- 
able characters — were we, by voluntarily going outside, to 
court indignities ? " (page 44). Hardly a page but has sen- 
tences of this suspended form. De Quincey may have caught 
it either directly from his favourite Greek and Latin classics or 
indirectly from Sir Thomas Browne and his other favourite 
seventeenth-century English authors. No trait of his style is 
more characteristic. 

4. De Quincey s Diction. 

In his choice of words De Quincey is what used to be called in 
the eighteenth century elegant. His vocabulary is exception- 
ally large (see page 109), and his use of it exceptionally nice. 
Few readers can appreciate it at its full without a dictionary ; 
and few writers will better endure, or better repay, the scru- 
tiny. But this virtue leans toward a vice. The words of his 
preference are often too abstract to make any direct appeal. 
" Some burden of commissions to be executed in Bath, which 
had gathered to her own residence as a central rendezvous for 
converging them " (page 56) — " the elaborate arrangement 
of laurels in their hats dilates their hearts " (page 62) — 
"the oblique and lateral communications with many rural 
post-offices " (page 74) — for description, the words seem 
gratuitously abstract and Latin. They suggest more care for 



xxxiv INTRODUCTION 

diy:riity, precision, and sonority than for force. Homely force 
of directness, of course, is not to be expected of De Quincey. 
Whether he could have attained it or not if he had tried, 
certainly he did not try. He had no wish to be hail-fellow- 
well-met with the great public. He addressed himself to 
readers of some culture and literary taste. But even with 
such readers he cannot escape the charge of over-indulging 
his fondness for recondite words and unusual applications, 
and even of lapses into pedantry. " Prelibation " (page 61) 
and "nostalgia" (page 26) are among the many instances of 
mere grandiloquence. Having indulged himself in a legal use 
of the word " constructively " at page 45, he repeats it quite 
unnecessarily at page 46, and again at page 51. The case 
would be of no importance if it were not typical of De 
Quincey's habit of choosing words for himself rather than 
for his readers. Rather than deny himself the pleasure, he 
will explain himself in a pedantic parenthesis or foot-note. 
Nay, he will even use parenthesis, digression, or foot-note for 
no apparent purpose except the display of learning. For it 
is impossible to read De Quincey attentively without becom- 
ing aware both of his true elegance, his admirable aptness and 
discrimination, and also of his false elegance, his artificiality 
and pedantry. Perhaps that is because he thought too much 
of style for the sake of style. 

Certainly his style is self-conscious. It is so carefully 
elaborated that it sometimes calls attention to itself More- 
over it is the style of a man that had a theory of style. Not 
only did he write essays on "Style" and "Rhetoric," but 
he cultivated an imaginative, emotional expression which he 
called "impassioned prose": 

' On these (i. e.. Confessions, Suspiria, etc.), as modes of impas- 
sioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any 
literature, it is much more difficult to speak justly. . . • Two re- 
marks only shall I address to the equity of my reader. First, I de- 
sire to remind him of the perilous difficulty besieging all attempts 



INTRODUCTION xxxv 

to clothe in words the visionary scenes derived from the world of 
dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, 
ruins the whole music; antl, secondly, I desire him to consider the 
utter sterility of universal literature in this one department of impas- 
sioned prose." AidohioijmpUc Sketches, I, xvii (Hogg's Edition). 

What this means in general method has been already dis- 
cussed. In detail the " impassioned prose " is felt at once as 
highly figurative and sometimes oratorical. Beneath these 
obvious qualities is something more distinctive. The "im- 
passioned prose " is rhythmical and alliterative.^ " Bishop of 
Beauvais ! thy victim died in fire," — this eloquent peroration 
will yield most striking results if analyzed as to its cadences 
and recurrences. It should be read aloud. 

Mr. Swinburne vents his ire at " the detestable as well as 
debatable land of pseudo-poetic rhapsody . . . after the least 
admirable manner of such writers as De Quincey " (Miscel- 
lanies, pages 222-23: Tennyson and Musset). But every 
imaginative emotional expression demands for just apprecia- 
tion some sympathy. True, instead of putting forward his 
conception of the finer art of prose as new, De Quincey might 
more safely have taken warrant from the doctrine of the 
ancients and the practice of his favourite Sir Thomas Browne. 
But, new or old, it may fairly be judged by its actual effects, 
by its power to move readers of some intellectual and emo- 
tional sympathy. So judging, one sees, indeed, those defects 
to which De Quincey himself knew his effort to be pecu- 
liarly Hable, but also feels, in spite of these, a strong uplifting 
of imagination. 

" A single false note," says De Quincey, "a single word in 
a wrong key, ruins the whole music." Some of his work, 
notably " Levana " and most of the "Dream-Fugue," may 
be said literally to fulfill this ideal of prose harmony. But in 
other pieces the harmony is occasionally jarred. The tone of 

1 For detailod analysis see Baldwin's College Manual of Rhetoric, fourth 
edition, pages 226-228. 



xxxvi INTRODUCTION 

the passage (page 80) beginning " Moonlight and the first 
timid tremblings of the dawn " is disturbed by " the villain of 
a schoolmaster." "The raving of hurricanes" (page 86) is 
hardly the moment for such nice mathematics as "stood 
rather obliquely and not quite so far advanced as to be accu- 
rately parallel with the near wheel." " The unknown lady 
from the dreadful vision (page 89) and I myself are floating 
— she upon a fairy pinnace, and I upon an EngUsh three- 
decker.'' The paragraph (XVII) describing the " natural asso- 
ciations " in his dreams of a certain fair Fanny with grotesque 
and fearsome monsters pushes incongruity perilously near to 
bathos. The chatty humour of parts of the " Joan of Arc " 
is most irritating precisely to those who are most sympathetic 
with the opening and the close. Such lap'ses show in detail 
the same lack that appears in the conception and method of 
the whole (page xxxi), a lack of power to sustain. 

Yet when all has been subtracted from De Quincey's prose 
that is not of his best, the remainder, though smaller than his 
admirers of forty years ago would have admitted, is still con- 
siderable. In spite of faults more apparent to our time than 
to his, it seems to have an assured ■ place in our literature. 
Readers of to-day must beware of judging him by a standard 
he would not have owned ; and they have something to learn 
from his ideal of elegant precision subservient to a high 
imagination. 

III. Notes for Teachers 

1. The Meaning. 

The first impressions of a piece of literature should usually 
come, not from opinions about it, nor from the biography of 
its author, but from the piece itself. In starting a class thus 
immediately upon the text, the first consideration is the 
meaning. A rather rapid preliminary reading of both essays 
may well be made with this view alone. Let the study of the 



INTRODUCTION xxxvii 

meaning be something more than the pursuit of "allusions " ; 
let it aim at an intelligent comprehension (1) of the subject- 
matter in its general significance, (2) of such details as indi- 
cate either this general significance or De Quincey's habit 
in choosing material. There is a real danger, with so allu- 
sive an author, that the student will make his note-book a 
mere rag-bag of miscellaneous and insignificant information. 
Therefore he must be taught to fix his attention on the 
important aspects, and to group his notes with these as 
headings. 

The notes in this edition deliberately avoid supplying such 
information as should be sought in ordinary books of refer- 
ence. They presuppose access to : 

1. a large dictionary, such as the " Century " or the " Stan- 
dard"; 

2. a cyclopsedia ; 

3. a standard history of each great European nation, or a 
general compendium of history such as Fisher's "Out- 
lines of Universal History," or Tillinghast's Translation 
of Ploetz's " Epitome of Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern 
History." The latter are sufficient for the placing of the 
great events mentioned by Pe Quincey. 

Such books should be in every school library, if they are 
not at hand in the town library. Consultation of them is an 
important part of schooling. 

Thus the main facts concerning Joan of Arc may be brought 
out in carefully assigned reports by individual students, and 
compiled by the class as a background of history. The re- 
sults will be every way better than from any rehearsal of 
separate facts as they come up in the text. But since De 
Quincey does not give a consecutive account of Joan of Arc 
(" I am not going to write the history of La Pmelle" page 7), 
and since the story is of absorbing interest, some time may 
well be spent in hearing students read aloud, after prepara- 
tion, some brief and simple narrative ; e. g. the story told in 



xxxviii INTR OD UCTION 

the beautifully illustrated edition of M. Boutet de Monvel 
(" Jeanne d'Arc"), which has been translated into English. 

The findings of the shameful trial of 1429-1430 were set 
aside, twenty years later (1449-145G), on thorough review of 
the evidence and the processes at law, at the instance of Pope 
Calixtus ; and formal sentence of " rehabilitation " was pro- 
nounced in 1456. In 1869 certain French prelates began a 
movement for Joan's canonisation. The processes, interrupted 
by the Franco-Prussian war, have extended through many 
years, and are not yet completed. 

" On January 27, 1894, the Congregation of Sacred Rites, 
on the report of Cardinal Parocchi, voted to recommend that 
the commission for the introduction of the case (' Commissio 
introductionis causae servae Dei Joannae d'Arc'), so-called, 
should be signed, which was immediately done by the Pope. 
This action is the first step toward canonisation, and confers 
upon Joan the title of ' Venerable.' " ^ 

On May 5, 1896, "it was decreed that there had always ex- 
isted a public veneration of her as a saintly person. On 
January 17, 1901, and December 18, 1903, the heroic charac- 
ter of her virtues was recognised by the Congregation of Rites. 
The latest action of the Holy See ... is dated January 6, 
1904. It recognises that she exercised in a heroic degree the 
virtues of faith, hope, and charity ; also those of prudence, 
justice, fortitude, and temperance; finally, that a certain 
number of miracles had been performed at her intercession. 
This action is only a further step in the formal process of 
canonisation." ^ Meantime the Maid is reverenced, even by 

1 Francis C Lowell, Joan of Arc, page 372. 

2 The editor is indebted to the Rev. Dr. Thomas J. Shahan, Professor 
of Church History in the Catholic Universitj' of America, for the alx)ve 
summary of items in Acta Sandce SccUs relating to the case of Joan of Arc. 
The latest action is noted in volume xxxvi, pages 429-432. Professor 
Shahan adds that volume xxvH, page 488, has "a synopsis of the life of 
Joan of Arc, which, I think, represents the v/ork of the Orleans Diocesan 
Commission that was appointed in 1877 to collect and verify the facts and 
lay them before the Congregation of Rites." 



INTRODUCTION xxxix 

many whose allegiance to the Church is rather loose, as a sa- 
cred embodiment of the French national idea. 

An authoritative publication (in the original Latin) of the 
trial and the rehabilitation was compiled by M. Jules Quiche- 
rat (" Proems de condamnation et de rehabilitation de Jeanne 
d'Arc, dite La Pucelle, publics pour la premiere fois d'apr^s 
les manuscrits," etc., Paris, 1841-49). This is the ultimate 
source of information. The facts of Joan's whole career, here 
given in minute detail, are at once amazing and thoroughly 
substantiated. De Quincey alludes to this work (note to 
page 7), but had not seen it. A French translation, classified 
and annotated, was made by E. O'Reilly (" Les deux proems 
de condamnation, les enquetes, et la sentence de rehabilitation 
de Jeanne d'Arc, mis pour la premiere fois int^gralement en 
fran^ais, d'apr^s les textes latins originaux officiels, avec notes," 
etc., 2 vols., Paris, 1868). An English translation, with a 
simple narrative introduction, notes and appendices, was made 
by T. Douglas Murray ("Jeanne d'Arc, Maid of Orleans, 
Deliverer of France ; being the story of her life, her achieve- 
ments, and her death, as attested on oath and set forth in the 
original documents " ; New York, McClure, Phillips & Co., 
1902). 

De Quincey's source is Michelet ("Histoire de France," 
vol. V, pages 40-167 of the revised edition in 17 vols., Paris, 
1861 ; i. e., book x, chapters iii and iv). He says that he 
used the English translation by Walter Kelly ("The History 
of France," by M. Michelet, translated by W. K. Kelly, 2 vols., 
London, 1844-46; vol. ii (1846), pages 515-586). American 
readers may find more convenient the translation by G. H. 
Smith. 

In spite of his pretence of resee.rch and his hazardous 
corrections of Michelet, it is fairly evident that De Quincey 
knew no other source. He used it, after his habit, as a point 
of departure, a series of suggestions to his imagination (see 
page xxx). * Research, in our current sense of to-day, he never 



xl INTRODUCTION 

practiced. . As history, his essay has no value ; as literature, 
it is examined above and in the notes. 

The following table refers his paragraphs (indicated by 
Roman numerals) to the corresponding pages in the fifth 
volume of Michelet (indicated by Arabic numerals) : — 

i-iv — 90, 92, 93 (merely the idea that Joan foresaw her 
suffering) ; v-vii — 43-45 ; xi — 46, 48, 42 ; xiv — 45 ; xvii 
— 58, 81; XX — 63, 90; xxi — 87, 88, 86, 102, 111; xxii — 
92, 66, 78, 63, 82, 90; xxiii — 104-106, 114, 116, 117, 131, 
126; xxiv— 129, 130, 136, 137; xxvii — 157 (foot-note — 
147); xxviii — 144, 159, 161 (foot-notes — 147 for 1 and 4; 
146 for 2 ; 55 for 3) ; xxix — 163, 161. 

De Quincey's handling of history is further analyzed in 
Baldwin's Edition of "The Revolt of the Tartars," pages 
90-96 (Longmans' English Classics). Compare the eloquent 
passage on history at page 6 of the "Joan of Arc" and the 
definition of a scholar at page 27. 

The subject-matter proper of " The English Mail-Coach " of 
course requires no general comment; but its backgi'ound of 
history should be filled in, as is suggested above, by reports 
on the historical significance of the Napoleonic wars. Instead 
of memorizing the dates of Salamanca and Vittoria, the stu- 
dent should place them as parts of a great European move- 
ment. To get a just view, however brief, of the principal 
movements and their objects is the more important because 
De Quincey's suggestions of the great history behind the small 
are those of an intensely British partisan. Some students 
will like to be reminded that the same campaigns lie behind 
Thackeray's "Vanity Fair." 

2. The Method. 
But history must not take too much time. This is the 
study of literature. Once a proper comprehension of subject- 
matter is assured, the main consideration is De Quincey's 
literary method. In this study the headings of the introduc- 



INTRODUCTION xli 

tory essay (pages xxv-xxxvi) may be used in the note-books to 
keep the students' notes in groups. The practice should not, 
of course, become mechanical ; but it is a natural means of 
securing definiteness where there is an easy lapse into vague- 
ness. De Quincey, moreover, being not only an essayist and 
something of a rhetorician, but also very conscious of his own 
literary processes, lends himself peculiarly well to the analy- 
sis of prose form. The study of his essays is properly, almost 
necessarily, a study of rhetoric. For further analysis see 
Minto's "Manual of English Prose Literature," part i, chap- 
ter i; an essay on De Quincey's "impassioned prose" by 
Professor Masson ("Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Other 
Essays," page 257); and Baldwin's "College Manual of Rhet- 
oric," fourth edition, pages 226-228. 

3. The Man. 

The last consideration is De Quincey's life — last because 
any author should be permitted to reveal himself primarily 
and mainly through his work, but also because the many 
stories about De Quincey have an interest which, though 
fascinating, is largely extraneous and often distracting. Our 
estimate of De Quincey must be based, not on other people's 
reports of his personal idiosyncrasies, nor even on the praises 
of his conversation, but on his pubKshed works. These, though 
we may judge them with some corrections by knowing the little 
that can really be known of his biography, must, after all, be 
judged for and by themselves. Fortunately, however, among 
the published works, are his famous " Confessions " and also 
his " Autobiographic Sketches." Whatever time can be spared 
for biography, beyond the sketch provided in this edition, 
may well be spent on these. 

For the teacher's preparation, the briefest, most orderly, 
most convenient biography is that by Leslie Stephen in the 
"Dictionary of National Biography." Professor Masson's 
biography in the English Men of Letters Series contains 



xlii INTRODUCTION 

a compact body of valuable criticism. The " Life of De 
Quincey" by H. A. Page (2 vols., New York, 1877) contains 
many interesting letters, but is ill put together. Mr. Page, 
this time under his proper name. Dr. Alexander H. Japp, has 
collected two more volumes of letters and comment under the 
title "De Quincey Memorials" (United States Book Co., 
1891). The collection corrects one's impressions of De Quin- 
cey in minor details, but hardly adds anything to the total 
estimate. Mr. James Hogg has collected in one volume the 
most interesting published reminiscences of De Quincey, and 
has added some equally interesting reminiscences of his own 
("De Quincey and his Friends"; London, 1895). This col- 
lection relates mainly to the Edinburgh period. It contains, 
among less important matter, Woodhouse's notes of conversa- 
tions with De Quincey, John Hill Burton's chapter entitled 
"Papaverius" in "The Book Hunter," and the recollections 
of Findlay, Colin Rae-Brown, Jacox, and James Payn. Dr. 
Shadworth Hodgson's " The Genius of De Quincey " is also 
reprinted from "Outcast Essays." 

There are two standard collective editions : the " River- 
side Edition" (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877, 12 
vols.), and Professor Masson's new and enlarged Edinburgh 
edition (A. and C. Black, 1889-90, 14 vols.). The latter 
is the lineal descendant of De Quincey's own collection for 
Hogg (1853-60), which was taken over by the Blacks in 18G2 • 
the former, an improved reissue of the American collection 
(Ticknor & Fields, 1851-1859). 

Of selections, the best is Professor Turk's volume in the 
Athenoeum Press Series (Boston, Ginn & Company, 1902 ; 400 
pages of text, including the two essays reprinted here ; 100 
pages of notes). The introductory critical essay of fifty pages 
is the most complete, consistent, and just estimate of De 
Quincey's place in literature. Some of the notes in this edi- 
tion, and some in Professor J. M. Hart's edition of "Joan of 
Arc "and "The Enghsh Mail-Coach" ("English Readings," 



INTRODUCTION xliii 

New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1893) are referred to below 
by the names of the editors. 

4. Themes. 

Among such brief reports as are suggested above for his- 
torical background may be others on De Quincey's life. 
Where the biographical material is assigned at all for themes, 
it is better assigned in some such fashion than in a block as 
a single biographical sketch. The latter assignment pretty 
surely elicits a mere digest. Special topics, on the other 
hand, such as De Quincey's Conversation, De Quincey's Read- 
ing, etc., open some opportunity for original composition. 

Critical studies, always on specific topics, are in the case ot 
De Quincey quite available. Such are De Quincey's Impas- 
sioned Prose, Its Aims and Its Methods ; A Comparison of 
De Q.uincey's Essay Method with Macaulay's ; The Opening 
of Paragraph XXIX (page 73) as a Text of De Quincey's 
Method ; De Quincey's Habit of Words, etc. 

Another profitable field for themes is opened by the note to 
page 54 Q^ modern . . . travelling cannot compare^'^ etc.), De 
Quincey's View of Railroads ; A Comparison of De Quincey's 
Description of Mail-Coach Travelling wilJi — (e. g. Dickens's in 
chapter xxviii of " Pickwick Papers ") ; The " Co-operation " 
of Railroads "to a National Result" (pages 42, 50. De 
Quincey, of course, views only the mail service. This, though 
immeasurably greater to-day, is almost overshadowed by the 
transportation of commodities) ; Going Home for the Holi- 
days (a description on the hint of paragraph III, or a com- 
parison of the treatment of a similar topic by Dickens, 
Thackeray, or Irving, as to the descriptive details chosen by 
each) ; A Comparison of De Quincey's Mail-Coachman with 
Dickens's Mr. Weller ; A Crowd Waiting for War News (or 
Election Returns ; hints from paragraphs XIII, XXI, XXII) ; 
The Crossing of Two Great American Roads (hint from para- 
graph VI of the "Joan of Arc"); — such themes involve the 



xliv INTRODUCTION 

practical application of methods. This may, in some few 
cases where the material is at hand from other courses, be 
carried even further by calling for a brief imaginative reali- 
zation of the story of Nathan Hale, Andr^, Washington at 
Valley Forge, Lady Jane Grey, Montcalm at Quebec, Mar- 
quette, etc. De Quincey should be used as a model except in 
(1) accuracy, and (2) order. 

A few advanced students may be called on to tabulate De 
Quincey's incidental arguments ; e. g., as to the detection 
of the dauphin (17), the speed of mail-coaches (54), Joan's 
military skill (20-21), the capacity of women (27), the anal- 
ogy of theatres (45). Topics for review and examination are 
furnished by the Introduction and the Notes. 



f 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



xlv 



CHRONOLOGICx\L TABLE. 



(Compiled from " Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual," The Dictionary of National 
Biography, Ryland's " Chronological Outlines of English Literature,'" and Whit- 
conib"s "Chronological Outlines of American Literature.") 



Life of De Quincey. 



1785. De (Quincey born. 



1796. Bath Grammar School 



1800. Winkfield School. 

Visit to Ireland with 
Lord Westport, and 
to Lady Carbery at 
Laxton. 

1801. Manchester Grammar 

Hciiool. 

1802. Escajje from school. 

Wanderings in 
Wales and London. 

1803. Oxford : Worcester 

College. 



1807. Meeting with Cole- 

ridge and Words- 
woVth. 

1808. London, brief law 

studies. 

1809. Grasmere. 



CONTEMPORAKY 
LlTERATUKE. 



1788. Byron born. 



1790. Burke, Reflections on 
tile Revolution in 
France. 

1792. Shellev born. 



1795. Carlyleand Keats born 



1798. 



1800. 



Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge, Lyrical Bal- 
lads. 

Macaulay born. 



1805. 
1806. 



1810. 



Scott, Lay of the Last 

Minstrel. 
Coleridge, Christabel. 



Scott, The Lady of the 
Lake. 



1812. Byron, Childe Harold 
(i. and ii.). 

1814. Scott, Waverley. 



Contemporary History. 



1793. 



1797. 



1800. 



United States Con- 
stitution ratilied 
by eleven States. 

Washington Presi- 
dent. Opening of 
the French Revo- 
lution. 



Whitney invented 
the cotton-gin. 



John Adams Presi; 
dent. 



Union of Great Bri- 
tain and Ireland. 



1801. Jefferson President. 



1803. 
1804. 



Louisiana Purchase. 
Napoleon Emperor. 



1809. Madison President. 



1812-14. War between 
England and the 
United States. 



xlvi 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.- Continued. 



Life op De Quincey. 



181G. Married Margaret 
yiinpison. 

1819. Studies in political 
economy. Editor of 
the Westmoreland 
Gazette. 



1821, 



London. Confessiovs 
of an English Opi- 
um-Eater* and 
translations fro m 
Richter in The Lon- 
d o n M a jj: a z i n e . 
Other articles (1822- 
1824). 



1827. 



Murder Considered as 
one of the Fine Arts 
(in Blackwood's 
Edinburgh Maga- 
zine). 

Edinburgh. Arti 
cles iu Blackwood. 



Contemporary 
Literature. 



Contemporary History. 



1815. Wordsworth, The 
White Doe of Ryl- 
stone. 

181G. Shelley, Alastor. 



1819. Byron, Don Juan (i. 

and ii.). Irving,1 
The Sketch-Book. 

1820. Keats, Lamia, and 

other poems. Scott, 
Ivauhoe. Shelley, 
Prometheus Un- 
bound. 



1822. Lamb, Essays of Elia. 

1824. Landor, Imaginary 

Conversations (i.). 

1825. Macaulay, Essay on 

Milton. 



1827. Alfred and Charles 
Tennyson, Poems. 



1828. Irviug,t Columbus. 



1830. Tennyson, Poci 
C;hielly Lyrical. 



1815. Battle of Waterloo, 
Stevenson's first 
locomotive. 



1819. Purchase of Florida. 
Steamers began to 
cross the Atlantic. 



1821. War of Grecian in- 
dependence. 



1825. J. Q. Adams Presi- 
dent. 



1830. William IV. King of 
England. 



* The titles of De Quincey's works are indicated by italickj. 
t American authors are tlius indicated. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.- Continued. 



xlWi 



Life op De Quincet. 



1832. Klosterheim (a novel). 



1834-40. Autobiographic 
sketches iu TaitV 
Edinburgh Maga- 
zine. 



Contemporary 
Literature. 



1837 



Mrs. De Quincey died 
Shttkspere, Pope (in 
Eiicych)piedia Bri 
taiinica). Fi.niHToi 
A Taktaii Tribe 
(in BlacKwood). 



1840. Cottage (Mavis Bush) 
at Lasswade. 

1840^0. Articles in Black- 
wood : The Essenes, 
Style and Rhetoric. 
Homer and tlie Ho- 
7/ieridce, Berkeley 
and Idealism, Ci- 
cero, Benjamin of 
Ihidela, The Logic 
of Polificcd Econo- 
my, Snspiria de 
Profiindis. 

1841-43. Glasgow, long vis- 
its at the houses of 
Professor Lushing- 
ton and Professor 
Nichol. 



1847. 



Glasgow again, in 
lodgings, to assist in 
ostahlishinixthe new 
North British Dailv 
Mail and the trans 
ferred Tail's ?>Iaga- 
zine. Tlic Spainsh 
Military Sun, Joan 
of Arc. 



1831. 



1833. 



1836. 
183r. 



1840. 



Poe,t Poems. Whit 
tier,+ Legends ol 
NewEn<rlaud. 



Carlyle, Sartor Resar 
tus. drowning, 
Pauline. 



Dickens, Pickwick 
Holmes,t Poems. 

Carlyle, Ti.e French 
Revolution. Pres 
cott,t Ferdinand 
and Isabella. Haw 
thoraie,t Tvvice-Told 
Tales. 



Poe,t Tales of the 
(Grotesque and Ara 
besque. 



CONTEJIPORAEY HiSTORT. 



1832. 
18o3. 



1837 



English Reform Bill 
passed. 

Abolition of slavery 
throughout the 
British Empire. 



Van Buren Presi- 
dent. Victoria 
Queen of Eng- 
land. 



1841. Browning, Pippa 
Passes. Carlyle, He- 
roes and Hero-Wor- 
ship. Emerson, t 
Essays. 

1843. Macauiay, Essays. 
Ruskin, Modern 
Painters (i.). 

1845. Carlyle, Crotnwell. 



1841. Harrison President. 
Tyler President. 



1844. Morse telegraph. 

1845. Polk President. 



Poe,tTheRaven and 1845-48. War between the 



1847. 



Other Poems. 

Charlotte Bronte, Jane 
Eyre. Tennyson, 
T he Princess. 
Thackeray, Vanity 
Fair. Longfellow, t 
Evangeline 



United States and 
Mexico. 



xlviii 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. - Concluded. 



Life of De Quincey. 



1848-59. Edinburgh, most of 
the time in lodgings. 

1849. The English Mail 
Coach. 



1851-52. American collective 
edition of De Quin- 
cey's works (J. T. 
Fields). 



1853. English collective edi- 
tion (James Hogg) 
begun. 



1859. Death, December 8th. 



Contemporary 

LiTERATURH. 



1848. 



1850, 



Macaulay, History of 
England (i. and ii.). 
Lowell, t A Fable for 
Critics. 

Tennyson, In Memo- 
riam. Hawthorne,t 
The Scarlet Letter. 



1854. 
1856. 



Thoreau,t Waklen. 
Motley,+ The Rise of 
the Dutch Republic. 



1858. Tennyson, Idylls of the 

King. 

1859. George Eliot, Adam 
Bede. George Mere- 
dith, Richard Fev- 
erel. 



Contemporary History, 



1848. Second French Re- 

public. Gold dis- 
covered in Cali- 
fornia. 

1849. Tayhjr President. 

1850. Fillmore President. 



1853. Napoleon III. Em- 
peror. 
1853. Pierce President. 



1854. Crimean War. 



1859. Darwin published 
The Origin of Spe- 
cies. John Brown's 
raid on Harper's 
Ferry. 



JOAN OF ARC 



JOAN OF ARC 



I. What is to be thought oilier ? What is to be thought of 
the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, 
that — like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and forests 
of Judea — rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out 
of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to 
a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station 
at the right hand of kings ? The Hebrew boy inaugurated his 
patriotic mission by an act, by a victorious act, such as no 
man could deny. But so did the girl of Lorraine, if we read 
her story as it was read by those who saw her nearest. ? Ad- 
verse armies bore witness to the boy as no pretender ; but so 
they did to the gentle girl. Judged by the voices of all who 
saw them from a station of good will, both were found true 

1 "Arc" : — Modern France, that should know a great deal b(;tter than 
myself, insists that the name is not D'Arc — i.e., of Arc — but iMrc. 
Now it happens sometimes, that if a person whose position guarantees his 
access to the best information, will content himself with gloomy dogma- 
tism, striking the table with his fist, and saying in a terriiic voice, " It is 
so, and there's an end of it," one bows deferentially, and submits. But 
if, unhappily for himself, won by this docility, he relents too amiably into 
reasons and arguments, probably one raises an insurrection against him 
that may never be crushed ; for in the fields of logic one can skirmish, 
perhaps, as well as he. Had he confined himself to dogmatism, he would 
have intrenched his position in darkness, and have hidden his own vulner- 
able points. But, coming down to base reasons, he lets in light, and one 
sees where to plant the blows. Now, the worshipful reason of modern 
France for disturbing the old received spelling, is — that Jean Hordal, a 
descendant of La Pucelle's brother, spelled the name Dare in 1612. But 
what of that ? It is notorious that what small matter of spelling Provi- 
dence had thought fit to disburse amongst man in the seventeenth century 
was all monopolised by printers ; now, M. Hordal was not a printer. 



4 DE QUINCE Y 

and loyal to any promises involved in their first acts. Ene- 
mies it was that made the difference between their subse- 
quent fortunes. The boy rose to a splendour and a noonday 
prosperity, both personal and public, that rang through the 
records of his people, and became a by-word amongst his pos- 
terity for a thousand years, until the sceptre was departing 
from Judah. The poor, forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank 
not herself from that cup of rest which she had secured for 
France. She never sang together with the songs that rose in 
her native Domr^my as echoes to the departing steps of in- 
vaders. She mingled not in the festal dances at Vaucouleurs 
which celebrated in rapture the redemption of France. No ! 
for her voice was then silent ; no ! for her feet were dust. 
Pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl ! whom, from earliest youth, 
ever I believed in as full of truth and self-sacrifice, this was 
amongst the strongest pledges for thi/ truth, that never once — 
no, not for a moment of weakness — didst thou revel in the 
vision of coronets and honour from man. Coronets for thee ! 
Oh no ! Honours, if they come when all is over, are for those 
that share thy blood. ^ Daughter of Domrdmy, when the 
gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the 
sleep of the dead. Call her. King of France, but she will not 
hear thee ! Cite her by thy apparitors to come and receive a 
robe of honour, but she will be found en contumace. When 
the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, 
shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave 
up all for her country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have 
been deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to do, that was 
thy portion in this life ; that was thy destiny ; and not for a 
moment was it hidden from thyself Life, thou saidst, is 
short ; and the sleep which is in the grave is long ! Let me 
use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly 
dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is so long. This 
pure creature — pure from every suspicion of even a visionary 
self-interest, even as she was pure in senses more obvious — 

1 " Those that share thy blood " ; — A collateral relative of Joanna's was 
subsequently ennobled by the title oi Du Lys. 






JOAN OF ARC 5 

never once did this holy child, as regarded herself, relax from 
her belief in the darkness that was travelling to meet her. 
She might not prefigure the very manner of her death ; she 
saw not in vision, perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery 
scaffold, the spectators without end on every road pouring 
into Rouen as to a coronation, the surging smoke, the volley- 
ing flames, the hostile faces all around, the pitying eye that 
lurked but here and there, until nature and imperishable 
truth broke loose from artificial restraints ; — these might not 
be apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. But 
the voice that called her to death, that she heard for ever. 

II. Great was the throne of France even in those days, and 
great was he that sat upon it ; but well Joanna knew that not 
the throne, nor he that sat upon it, was for her ; but, on the 
contrary, that she was for them ; not she by them, but they by 
her, should rise from the dust. Gorgeous were the lilies of 
France, and for centuries had the privilege to spread their 
beauty over land and sea, until, in another century, the wrath 
of God and man combined to wither them ; but well Joanna 
knew, early at Domr^my she had read that bitter truth, that 
the lilies of France would decorate no garland for her. Flower 
nor bud, bell nor blossom, would ever bloom for her ! 

III. But stay. What reason is there for taking up this 
subject of Joanna precisely in the spring of 1847 ? Might it 
not have been left till the spring of 1947 ? or, perhaps, left till 
called for ? Yes, but it is called for ; and clamorously. You 
are aware, reader, that amongst the many original thinkers 
whom modern France has produced, one of the reputed lead- 
ers is M. Michelet. All these writers are of a revolutionary 
cast ; not in a political sense merely, but in all senses ; mad, 
oftentimes, as March hares ; crazy with the laughing gas of re- 
covered liberty ; drunk with the wine-cup of their mighty rev- 
olution, snorting, whinnying, throwing up their heels, like wild 
horses in the boundless Pampas, and running races of defiance 
with snipes, or with the winds, or with their own shadows, if 
they can find nothing else to challenge. Some time or other 



6 DE QUINCEY 

I, that have leisure to read, may intrcduce you, that have not, 
to two or three dozen of these writers ; of whom I can assure 
you beforehand that they are often profound, and at intervals 
are even as impassioned as if they were come of our best Eng- 
lish blood. But now, confining our attention to M. Michelet, 
we in England — who know him best by his worst book, the 
book against priests, &c. — know him disadvantageously.. 
That book is a rhapsody of incoherence. But his " History of 
France " is quite another thing. A man, in whatsoever craft 
he sails, cannot stretch away out of sight when he is linked to 
the windings of the shore by towing-ropes of history. Facts, 
and the consequences of facts, draw the writer back to the fal- 
coner's lure from the giddiest heights of speculation. Here, 
therefore — in his " France " — if not always free from flighti- 
ness, if now and then off like a rocket for an airy wheel in the 
clouds, M. Michelet, with natural politeness, never forgets 
that he has left a large audience waiting for him on earth, 
and gazing upwards in anxiety for his return : return, there- 
fore, he does. But history, though clear of certain tempta- 
tions in one direction, has separate dangers of its own. It is 
impossible so to write a history of France, or of England — 
works becoming every hour more indispensable to the inevi- 
tably-political man of this day — without perilous openings 
for error. If I, for instance, on the part of England, should 
happen to turn my labours into that channel, and (on the 
model of Lord Percy going to Chevy Chase) 

" A vow to God shoukl make 

My pleasure in the Michelet woods 
Three summer days to take," 

probably, from simple delirium, I might hunt M. Michelet into 
delirium tremens. Two strong angels stand by the side of 
history, whether French history or English, as heraldic sup- 
porters : the angel of research on the left hand, that must read 
millions of dusty parchments, and of pages blotted with lies ; the 
angel of meditation on the right hand, that must cleanse these 
lying records with fire, even as of old the draperies of asbestos 



JOAN OF ARC 7 

were cleansed, and must quicken them into regenerated life. 
Willingly I acknowledge that no man will ever avoid innumer- 
able errors of detail ; with so vast a compass of ground to 
traverse, this is impossible ; but such errors (though I have a 
bushel on hand, at M. Michelet's service) are not the game I 
chase ; it is the bitter and unfair spirit in which M. Michelet 
writes against England. Even that, after all, is but my sec- 
ondary object ; the real one is Joanna, the Pucelle d'Orl^ans 
for herself. 

IV. I am not going to write the history of La Pucelle : to 
do this, or even circumstantially to report the history of her 
persecution and bitter death, of her struggle with false wit- 
nesses and with ensnaring judges, it would be necessary to 
have before us all the documents, and therefore the collection 
only now forthcoming ^ in Paris. But my purpose is narrower. 
There have been great thinkers, disdaining the careless judg- 
ments of contemporaries, who have thrown themselves boldly 
on the judgment of a far posterity, that should have had time 
to review, to ponder, to compare. There have been great 
actors on the stage of tragic humanity that might, with the 
same depth of confidence, have appealed from the levity of 
compatriot friends — too heartless for the sublime interest of 
their story, and too impatient for the labour of sifting its per- 
plexities — to the magnanimity and justice of enemies. To 
this class belongs the Maid of Arc. The ancient Romans 
were too faithful to the ideal of grandeur in themselves not 
to relent, after -a generation or two, before the grandeur 
of Hannibal. Mithridates — a more doubtful person — yet, 
merely for the magic perseverance of his indomitable malice, 
won from the same Romans the only real honour that ever 
he received on earth. And we English have ever shown the 
same homage to stubborn enmity. To work unflinchingly for 
the ruin of England ; to say through life, by word and by deed, 
Delenda est Anglia Victrix ! that one purpose of malice, faith- 

1 ''Only noin forthcoming ": — In 1847 begari the publication (from 
official records) of Joanna's trial. It was interrupted, I fear, by the con- 
vulsions of 1848 ; and whether even yet finished, I do not know. 



8 DE QUINCE Y 

fully pursued, has quartered some people upon our national 
funds of homage as by a perpetual annuity. Better than an 
inheritance of service rendered to England herself, has some- 
times proved the most insane hatred to England. Hyder Ali, 
even his son Tippoo, though so far inferior, and Napoleon, 
have all benefited by this disposition amongst ourselves to 
exaggerate the merit of diabolic enmity. Not one of these 
men was ever capable, in a solitary instance, of praising an 
enemy (what do you say to that, reader 1), and yet, in their 
behalf, we consent to forget, not their crimes only, but (which 
is worse) their hideous bigotry and anti-magnanimous egotism 
— for nationality it was not. Suffren, and some half dozen 
of other French nautical heroes, because rightly they did us 
all the mischief they could (which was really great), are names 
justly reverenced in England. On the same principle. La 
Pucelle d'Orldans, the victorious enemy of England, has been 
destined to receive her deepest commemoration from the 
magnanimous justice of Englishmen. 

V. Joanna, as we in England should call her, but, according 
to her own statement, Jeanne (or, as M. Michelet asserts, 
Jean)^ D'Arc, was born at Domrdmy, a village on the 
marches of Lorraine and Champagne, and dependent upon 
the town of Vaucouleurs. I have called her a Lorrainer, not 
simply because the word is prettier, but because Champagne 

1 " Jean " ; — M. Michelet asserts that there was a mystical meaning at 
that era in calling a child Jean ; it inij)lie(l a secret commendation of a 
child, if not a dedication, to St. John the evangelist, the beloved disciple, 
the apostle of love and mysterious visions. But, really, as the name was 
so exceedingly common, few people will detect a mystery in calling a boy 
by the name of Jack, though it does seem mysterious to call a girl Jack. 
It may be less so in France, where a beautiful practice has always pre- 
vailed of giving a boy his mother's name — preceded and strengthened by 
a male name, as Charles Anne, Victor Victoire. In cases where a mother's 
memory has been unusually dear to a son, this vocal memento of her, 
locked into the circle of his own name, gives to it the tenderness of a 
testamentary relique, or a funeral ring. I presume, therefore, that La 
Pucelle must have borne the baptismal name of Jeanne Jean ; the latter 
with no reference, perhaps, to so sublime a person as St. John, but simply 
to some relative. 



JOAN OF ARC 9 

too odiously reminds us English of what are for us imaginary 
wines, which, undoubtedly, La Pucelle tasted as rarely as we 
Enghsh; we English, because the Champagne of London is 
chiefly grown in Devonshire ; La Pucelle, because the Cham- 
pagne of Champagne never, by any chance, flowed into the 
fountain of Domr^my, from which only she drank. M. Michelet 
will have her to be a Champenoisb, and for no better reason 
than that she "took after her father," who happened to be a 
Champenois. 

VI. These disputes, however, turn on refinements too nice. 
Domrdmy stood upon the frontiers, and, like other frontiers, 
produced a mixed race, representing the els and the trans. A 
river (it is true) formed the boundary-line at this point — the 
river Meuse ; and that, in old days, might have divided the 
populations ; but in these days it did not : there were bridges, 
there were ferries, and weddings crossed from the right bank 
to the left. Here lay two great roads, not so much for trav- 
ellers that were few, as for armies that were too many by half. 
These two roads, one of which was the great highroad between 
France and Germany, decussated at this very point; which 
is a learned way of saying that they formed a St. Andrew's 
Cross, or letter X- I hope the compositor will choose a 
good large X, in which case the point of intersection, the locus 
of conflux and intersection for these four diverging arms, will 
finish the reader's geographical education, by showing him to 
a hair's-breadth where it was that Domrdmy stood. These 
roads, so grandly situated, as great trunk arteries between 
two mighty realms,^ and haunted for ever by wars or rumours 
of wars, decussated (for anything I know to the contrary) 
absolutely under Joanna's bedroom w^indow ; one rolling 
away to the right, past Monsieur D'Arc's old barn, and the 
other unaccountably preferring to sweep round that odious 
man's pig- sty to the left. 

VII. On whichever side of the border chance had thrown 

1 And reminding one of that inscriyjtion, so justly admired by Paul 
Richter, which a Russian Czarina placed on a guide-post near Moscow, 
This is the road that leads to Constantinople. 



10 DE QUINCE Y 

Joanna, the same love to France would have been nurtured. 
For it is a strange fact, noticed by M. Michelet and others, 
that the Dukes of Bar and Lorraine had for generations 
pursued the policy of eternal warfare with France on their 
own account, yet also of eternal amity and league with France 
in case anybody else presumed to attack her. Let peace settle 
upon France, and before long you might rely upon seeing 
the little vixen Lorraine flying at the throat of France. Let 
France be assailed by a formidable enemy, and instantly you 
saw a Duke of Lorraine insisting on having his own throat 
cut in support of France ; which favour accordingly was 
cheerfully granted to him in three great successive battles — 
twice by the English, viz., at Crecy and Agincourt, once by 
the Sultan at Nicopolis. 

VII L This sympathy with France during great eclipses, in 
those that during ordinary seasons were always teasing her 
with brawls and guerilla inroads, strengthened the natural 
piety to France of those that were confessedly the children of 
her own house. The outposts of France, as one may call the 
great frontier provinces, were of all localities the most de- 
voted to the Fleurs de Lys. To witness, at any great crisis, 
the generous devotion to these lilies of the little fiery cousin 
that in gentler weather was for ever tilting at the breast of 
France, could not but fan the zeal of France's legitimate 
daughters ; whilst to occupy a post of honour on the frontiers 
against an old hereditary enemy of France, would naturally 
stimulate this zeal by a sentiment of martial pride, by a sense 
of danger always threatening, and of hatred always smoulder- 
ing. That great four-headed road was a perpetual memento 
to patriotic ardour. To say, this way lies the road to Paris, 
and that other way to Aix-la-Chapelle — this to Prague, that 
to Vienna — nourished the warfare of the heart by daily min- 
istrations of sense. The eye that watched for the gleams of 
lance or helmet from the hostile frontier, the ear that listened 
for the groaning of wheels, made the highroad itself, with 
its relations to centres so remote, into a manual of patriotic 
duty. 



JOAN OF ARC 11' 

IX. The situation, therefore, locally, of Joanna was full of 
profound suggestions to a heart that listened for the stealthy 
steps of change and fear that too surely were in motion. 
But, if the place were grand, the time, the burden of the time, 
was far more so. The air overhead in its upper chambers 
was hurtling with the obscure sound ; was dark with sullen 
fermenting of storms that had been gathering for a hundred 
and thirty years. The battle of Agincourt in Joanna's 
childhood had reopened the wounds of France. Crdcy 
and Poictiers, those withering overthrows for the chivalry of 
France, had, before Agincourt occurred, been tranquillised by 
more than half a century; but this resurrection of their 
trumpet wails made the whole series of battles and endless 
skirmishes take their stations as parts in one drama. The 
graves that had closed sixty years ago seemed to fly open in 
sympathy with a sorrow that echoed their own. The monarchy 
of France laboured in extremity, rocked and reeled like a ship 
fighting with the darkness of monsoons. The madness of the 
poor king (Charles VI.) falling in at such a crisis, like the 
case of women labouring in childbirth during the storming of 
a city, trebled the awfulness of the time. Even the wild story 
of the incident which had immediately occasioned the explo- 
sion of this madness — the case of a man unknown, gloomy, 
and perhaps maniacal himself, coming out of a forest at noon- 
day, laying his hand upon the bridle of the king's horse, 
checking him for a moment to say, " Oh, king, thou art be- 
trayed," and then vanishing, no man knew whither, as he had 
appeared for no man knew what — fell in with the universal 
prostration of mind that laid France on her knees, as before 
the slow unweaving of some ancient prophetic doom. The 
famines, the extraordinary diseases, the insurrections of the 
peasantry up and down Europe — these were chords struck 
from the same mysterious harp; but these were transitory 
chords. There had been others of deeper and more ominous 
sound. The termination of the Crusades, the destruction of 
the Templars, the Papal interdicts, the tragedies caused or 
suffered by the house of Anjou, and by the emperor — these 



f^ 



12 T>E QUTNCEY 

were full of a more permanent significance. But, since then, 
the colossal figure of feudalism was seen standing, as it were 
on tiptoe, at Cr^cy, for flight from earth : that was a revolu- 
tion unparalleled ; yet that was a trifle by comparison with the 
more fearful revolutions that were mining below the church. 
By her own internal schisms, by the abominable spectacle of a 
double pope — so that no man, except through political bias, 
could even guess which was Heaven's vicegerent, and which 
the creature of hell — the church was rehearsing, as in still 
earlier forms she had already rehearsed, those vast rents in 
her foundations which no man should ever heal. 

X. These were the loftiest peaks of the cloudland in the 
skies that to the scientific gazer first caught the colours of 
the new morning in advance. But the whole vast range alike 
of sweeping glooms overhead, dwelt upon all meditative minds, 
even upon those that could not distinguish the tendencies nor 
decipher the forms. It was, therefore, not her own age alone, 
as affected by its immediate calamities, that lay with such 
weight upon Joanna's mind ; but her own age, as one section 
in a vast mysterious drama, unweaving through a century 
back, and drawing nearer continually to some dreadful crisis. 
Cataracts and rapids were heard roaring ahead ; and signs 
were seen far back, by help of old men's memories, which 
answered secretly to signs now coming forward on the eye, 
even as locks answer to keys. It was not wonderful that in 
such a haunted solitude, with such a haunted heart, Joanna 
should see angelic visions, and hear angelic voices. These 
voices whispered to her for ever the duty, self-imposed, of 
delivering France. Five years she listened to these monitory 
voices with internal struggles. At length she could resist no 
longer. Doubt gave way ; and she left her home for ever in 
order to present herself at the dauphin's court. 

XL The education of this poor girl was mean according to 
the present standard : was ineffably grand, according to a purer 
philosophic standard : and only not good for our age, because 
for us it would be unattainable. She read nothing, for she 
could not read ; but she had heard others read parts of the 



JOAN OF ARC 13 

Roman martyrology. She wept in sympathy with the sad 
Misereres of the Romish Church ; she rose to heaven with 
the glad triumphant Te Deums of Rome : she drew her com- 
fort and her vital strength from the rites of the same church. 
But, next after these spiritual advantages, she owed most to 
the advantages of her situation. The fountain of Domrdmy 
was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and it was haunted to 
that degree by fairies that the parish priest {cure) was obliged 
to read mass there once a-year, in order to keep them in any 
decent bounds. Fairies are important, even in a statistical 
view : certain weeds mark poverty in the soil, fairies mark its 
solitude. As surely as the wolf retires before cities, does 
the fairy sequester herself from the haunts of the licensed 
victualler. A village is too much for her nervous delicacy : 
at most, she can tolerate a distant view of a hamlet. We 
may judge, therefore, by the uneasiness and extra trouble 
which they gave to the parson, in what strength the fairies 
mustered at Domr(^my, and, by a satisfactory consequence, 
how thinly sown with men and women must have been that 
region even in its inhabited spots. But the forests of Dom- 
rt^my — those were the glories of the land : for in them abode 
mysterious powers and ancient secrets that towered into tra- 
gic strength. "Abbeys there were, and abbey windows" — 
"like Moorish temples of the Hindoos," that exercised even 
princely power both in Lorraine and in the German Diets. 
These had their sweet bells that pierced the forests for many 
a league at matins or vespers, and each its own dreamy 
legend. Few enough, and scattered enough, were these 
abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the deep solitude of 
the region ; yet many enough to spread a network or awning 
of Christian sanctity over what else might have seemed a 
heathen wilderness. This sort of religious talisman being 
secured, a man the most afraid of ghosts (like myself, sup- 
pose, or the reader) becomes armed into courage to wander 
for days in their sylvan recesses. The mountains of the 
Vosges, on the eastern frontier of France, have never attracted 
much notice from Europe, except in 1813-14 for a few brief 



14 DE QUINCE Y 

months, when they fell within Napoleon's line of defence 
against the Allies. But they are interesting for this, amongst 
other features, that they do not, like some loftier ranges, repel 
woods : the forests and the hills are on sociable terms. Live 
and let live is their motto. For this reason, in part, these 
tracts in Lorraine were a favourite hunting-ground with 
the Carlovingian princes. About six hundred years before 
Joanna's childhood, Charlemagne was known to have hunted 
there. That, of itself, was a grand incident in the traditions 
of a forest or a chase. In these vast forests, also, were to be 
found (if anywhere to be found) those mysterious fawns that 
tempted solitary hunters into visionary and perilous pursuits. 
Here was seen (if anywhere seen) that ancient stag who was 
already nine hundred years old, but possibly a hundred or 
two more, when met by Charlemagne ; and the thing was put 
beyond doubt by the inscription upon his golden collar. I 
believe Charlemagne knighted the stag : and, if ever he is 
met again by a king, he ought to be made an earl : or, being 
upon the marches of France, a marquis. Observe, I don't 
absolutely vouch for all these things : my own opinion varies. 
On a fine breezy forenoon I am audaciously sceptical ; but as 
twilight sets in, my credulity grows steadily, till it becomes 
equal to anything that could be desired. And I have heard 
candid sportsmen declare that, outside of these very forests, 
they laughed loudly at all the dim tales connected with their 
haunted solitudes ; but, on reaching a spot notoriously eigh- 
teen miles deep within them, they agreed with Sir Roger de 
Coverley, that a good deal might be said on both sides. 

XII. Such traditions, or any others that (like the stag) con- 
nect distant generations with each other, are, for that cause, 
sublime ; and the sense of the shadowy, connected with such 
appearances that reveal themselves or not, according to cir- 
cumstances, leaves a colouring of sanctity over ancient forests, 
even in those minds that utterly reject the legend as a fact. 

XIII. But, apart from all distinct stories of that order, in 
any solitary frontier between two great empires, as here, for 
instance, or in the desert between Syria and the Euphrates, 



JOAN OF ARC 15 

there is an inevitable tendency, in minds of any deep sensi- 
bility, to people the solitudes with phantom images of powers 
that were of old so vast. Joanna, therefore, in her quiet 
occupation of a shepherdess, would be led continually to 
brood over the political condition of her country, by the 
traditions of the past no less than by the mementos of the 
local present. 

XIV. M. Michelet, indeed, says that La Pucelle was 7iot a 
shepherdess. I beg his pardon : she was. What he rests 
upon I guess pretty well : it is the evidence of a woman 
called Haumette, the most confidential friend of Joanna. 
Now, she is a good witness, and a good girl, and I like her ; 
for she makes a natural and affectionate report of Joanna's 
ordinary life. But still, however good she may be as a wit- 
ness, Joanna is better ; and she, when speaking to the dauphin, 
calls herself in the Latin report Bergereta. Even Haumette 
confesses that Joanna tended sheep in her girlhood. And I 
believe, that if Miss Haumette were taking coffee alone with 
me this very evening (February 12, 1847) — in which there 
would be no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, because 
I am an intense philosopher, and Miss H. would be hard upon 
four hundred and fifty years old — she would admit the fol- 
lowing comment upon her evidence to be right. A French- 
man, about forty years ago, M. Simond, in his "Travels," 
mentions incidentally the following hideous scene as one 
steadily observed and watched by himself in chivalrous 
France, not very long before the French Revolution : — A 
peasant was ploughing ; and the team that drew his plough 
was a donkey and a woman. Both were regularly harnessed : 
both pulled alike. This is bad enough ; but the Frenchman 
adds, that, in distributing his lashes, the peasant was obvi- 
ously desirous of being impartial : or, if either of the yoke- 
fellows had a right to complain, certainly it was not the 
donkey. Now, in any country where sucK degradation of 
females could be tolerated by the state of manners, a woman 
of delicacy would shrink from acknowledging, either for her- 
self or her friend, that she had ever been addicted to any 



16 DE QUINCEY 

mode of labour not strictly domestic ; because, if once owning 
herself a prsedial servant, she would be sensible that this con- 
fession extended by probability in the hearer's thoughts to 
the having incurred indignities of this horrible kind. Hau- 
mette clearly thinks it more dignified for Joanna to have been 
darning the stockings of her horny-hoofed father, Monsieur 
D'Arc, than keeping sheep, lest she might then be suspected 
of having ever done something worse. But, luckily, there was 
no danger of that : Joanna never was in service ; and my 
opinion is, that her father should have mended his own stock- 
ings, since probably he was the party to make the holes in 
them, as many a better man than D'Arc does ; meaning by 
that not myself, because, though probably a better man than 
D'Arc, I protest against doing anything of the kind. If I 
lived even with Friday in Juan Fernandez, either Friday 
must do all the darning, or else it must go undone. The 
better men that I meant were the sailors in the British 
navy, every man of whom mends his own stockings. Who 
else is to do iti Do you suppose, reader, that the junior 
lords of the admiralty are under articles to darn for the 
navy 1 

XV. The reason, meantime, for my systematic hatred of 
D'Arc is this. There was a story current in France before 
the Revolution, framed to ridicule the pauper aristocracy, who 
happened to have long pedigrees and short rent rolls ; viz., 
that a head of such a house, dating from the Crusades, w^as 
overheard saying to his son, a Chevalier of St. Louis, " Cheva- 
lier^ as-tu donne au cochon a manger ? " Now, it is clearly 
made out by the surviving evidence, that D'Arc would much 
have preferred continuing to say, ^^ Ma fills, as-tu donne au 
cochon a manger .?" to saying, ^^ Pucelle d' Orleans, as-tu sauve 
les fleurs-de-hjs ? " There is an old English copy of verses 
which argues thus : — 

" If the mail that turnips cries, 
Cry not when his father dies, 
Then 't is plain the man had rather 
Have a turnip than his father." 



JOAN OF ARC 17 

I cannot say that the logic of these verses was ever entirely to 
my satisfaction. I do not see my way through it as clearly 
as could be wished. But I see my way most clearly through 
D'Arc; and the result is — that he would greatly have pre- 
ferred not merely a turnip to his father, but the saving a 
pound or so of bacon to saving the Oriflamme of France. 

XVI. It is probable (as M. Michelet suggests) that the title 
of Virgin, or Pucelle, had in itself, and apart from the miracu- 
lous stories about her, a secret power over the rude soldiery 
and partisan chiefs of that period ; for, in such a person, they 
saw a representative manifestation of the Virgin Mary, who, 
in a course of centuries, had grown steadily upon the popular 
heart. 

XVII. As to Joanna's supernatural detection of the dauphin 
(Charles VII.) amongst three hundred lords and knights, I am 
surprised at the credulity which could ever lend itself to that 
theatrical juggle. Who admires more than myself the sub- 
lime enthusiasm, the rapturous faith in herself, of this pure 
creature ? But I am far from admiring stage artifices, which 
not La Pucelle, but the court, must have arranged ; nor can 
surrender myself to the conjurer's legerdemain, such as may 
be seen every day for a shilling. Southey's " Joan of Arc " 
was published in 1796. Twenty years after, talking with 
Southey, I was surprised to find him still owning a secret bias 
in favour of Joan, founded on her detection of the dauphin. 
The story, for the benefit of the reader new to the case, was 
this : — La Pucelle was first made known to the dauphin, and 
presented to his court, at Chinon : and here came her first 
trial. By way of testing her supernatural pretensions, she 
was to find out the royal personage amongst the whole ark of 
clean and unclean creatures. Failing in this cowp d'essai, 
she would not simply disappoint many a beating heart in the 
glittering crowd that on different motives yearned for her suc- 
cess, but she would ruin herself — and, as the oracle within 
had told her, would, by ruining herself, ruin France. Our 
own sovereign lady Victoria rehearses annually a trial not 
so severe in degree, but the same in kind. She " pricks " for 

2 



18 DE QUINCE Y 

sheriffs. Joanna pricked for a king. But observe the differ- 
ence : our own lady pricks for two men out of three ; Joanna 
for one man out of three hundred. Happy Lady of the 
Islands and the orient ! — she can go astray in her choice only 
by one half : to the extent of one half she must have the 
satisfaction of being right. And yet, even with these tight 
limits to the misery of a boundless discretion, permit me,, 
liege Lady, with all loyalty, to submit — that now and then 
you prick with your pin the wrong man. But the poor child 
from Domrdmy, shrinking under the gaze of a dazzling court 
— not because dazzling (for in visions she had seen those that 
were more so), but because some of them wore a scoffing smile 
on their features — how should she throw her line into so deep 
a river to angle for a king, where many a gay creature was 
sporting that masqueraded as kings in dress ! Nay, even 
more than any true king would have done : for, in Southey's 
version of the story, the dauphin says, by way of trying the 
virgin's magnetic sympathy with royalty, 



" On the throne, 
igling with the 
courtier shall be seated.' 



I the while mingling with the menial throng, 



This usurper is even crowned : " the jewelled crown shines 
on a menial's head." But really, that is ^' u?i peufort'' ; and 
the mob of spectators might raise a scruple whether our 
friend the jackdaw upon the throne, and the dauphin himself, 
were not grazing the shins of treason. For the dauphin 
could not lend more than belonged to him. According to the 
popular notion, he had no crown for himself; consequently 
none to lend, on any pretence whatever, until the consecrated 
Maid should take him to Rheims. This was the popular 
notion in France. But certainly it was the dauphin's interest 
to support the popular notion, as he meant to use the ser- 
vices of Joanna. For, if he were king already, what was it 
that she could do for him beyond Orleans 1 That is to say, 
what more than a merely military service could she render 
him % And, above all, if he were king without a coronation, 



JOAN OF ARC 19 

and without the oil from the sacred ampulla, what advantage 
was yet open to him by celerity above his competitor, the 
English boy ? Now was to be a race for a coronation : he 
that should win that race carried the superstition of France 
along with him : he that should first be drawn from the 
ovens of Rheims, was under that superstition baked into a 
king. 

XVIII. La Pucelle, before she could be allowed to practise 
as a warrior, was put through her manual and platoon exer- 
cise, as a pupil in divinity, at the bar of six eminent men in 
wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, Book III., in the original 
edition of his "Joan of Arc"), she ''appalled the doctors." 
It 's not easy to do tliat : but they had some reason to feel 
bothered, as that surgeon would assuredly feel bothered, who, 
upon proceeding to dissect a subject, should find the subject 
retaliating as a dissector upon himself, especially if Joanna 
ever made the speech to them which occupies v. 354-391, 
B. III. It is a double impossibility : 1st, because a piracy 
from Tindal's "Christianity as old as the Creation" — a 
piracy a parte ante, and by three centuries ; 2dly, it is quite 
contrary to the evidence on Joanna's trial. Southey's " Joan " 
of A. D. 1796 (Cottle, Bristol) tells the doctors, amongst other 
secrets, that she never in her life attended — 1st, Mass ; nor 
2d, the Sacramental table ; nor 3d, Confession. In the 
meantime, all this deistical confession of Joanna's, besides 
being suicidal for the interest of her cause, is opposed to the 
depositions upon both trials. The very best witness called 
from first to last deposes that Joanna attended these rites of 
her church even too often ; was taxed with doing so ; and, by 
blushing, owned the charge as a fact, though certainly not as 
a fault. Joanna was a girl of natural piety, that saw God in 
forests, and hills, and fountains ; but did not the less seek 
him in chapels and consecrated oratories. 

XIX. This peasant girl was self-educated through her own 
natural meditativeness. If the reader turns to that divine 
passage in " Paradise Regained," which Milton has put into 
the mouth of our Saviour when first entering the wilderness. 



20 DE QUINCE Y 

and musing upon the tendency of those great impulses grow- 
ing within himself 

" Oh, what a multitude of thoughts at once 
Awakeu'd in me swarm, w^hile I consider 
What ironi within I feel myself, and hear 
What from without comes often to my ears, 
111 sorting with my present state compared ! 
When I was yet a child, no childish play 
To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do 
What might be public good ; myself I thought 
Born to that end " 

he will have some notion of the vast reveries which brooded 
over the heart of Joanna in early girlhood, when the wings 
were budding that should carry her from Orleans to Rheims ; 
when the golden chariot was dimly revealing itself that should 
carry her from the kingdom of France Delivered to the eternal 
kingdom. 

XX. It is not requisite for the honour of Joanna, nor is 
there, in this place, room, to pursue her brief career of action. 
That, though wonderful, forms the earthly part of her story : 
the spiritual part is the saintly passion of her imprisonment, 
trial, and execution. It is unfortunate, therefore, for Southey's 
" Joan of Arc " (which, however, should always be regarded 
as a juvenile effort), that, precisely when her real glory be- 
gins, the poem ends. But this limitation of the interest 
grew, no doubt, from the constraint inseparably attached to 
the law of epic unity. Joanna's history bisects into two 
opposite hemispheres, and both could not have been presented 
to the eye in one poem, unless by sacrificing all unity of 
theme, or else by involving the earlier half, as a narrative 
episode, in the latter ; which, however, might have been done, 
for it might have been communicated to a fellow-prisoner, or 
a confessor, by Joanna herself It is sufficient, as concerns 
this section of Joanna's life, to say that she fulfilled, to the 
height of her promises, the restoration of the prostrate throne. 
France had become a province of England ; and for the ruin 



JOAN OF ARC 21 

of both, if such a yoke could be maintained. Dreadful 
pecuniary exhaustion caused the English energy to droop ; 
and that critical opening La Pucelle used with a corresponding 
felicity of audacity and suddenness (that were in themselves 
portentous) for introducing the wedge of French native re- 
sources, for rekindling the national pride, and for planting 
the dauphin once more upon his feet. When Joanna ap- 
peared, he had been on the point of giving up the struggle 
with the English, distressed as they were, and of flying to the 
south of France. She taught him to blush for such abject 
counsels. She liberated Orleans, that great city, so decisive 
by its fate for the issue of the war, and then beleaguered by 
the English with an elaborate application of engineering skill 
unprecedented in Europe. Entering the city after sunset, on 
the 29th of April, she sang mass on Sunday, May 8, for the 
entire disappearance of the besieging force. On the 29th of 
June, she fought and gained over the EngHsh the decisive 
battle of Patay ; on the 9th of July, she took Troyes by a 
coup-de-main from a mixed garrison of English and Burgun- 
dians ; on the 15th of that month, she carried the dauphin 
into Rheims ; on Sunday the 17th, she crowned him; and 
there she rested from her labour of triumph. All that was to 
be do)2e, she had now accomplished : what remained was — 
to suffer. 

XXI. All this forward movement was her own : excepting 
one man, the whole council was against her. Her enemies 
were all that drew power from earth. Her supporters were 
her own strong enthusiasm, and the headlong contagion by 
which she carried this sublime frenzy into the hearts of 
women, of soldiers, and of all who lived by labour. Hence- 
forwards she was thwarted ; and the worst error that she 
committed was to lend the sanction of her presence to coun- 
sels which she had ceased to approve. But she had now ac- 
complished the capital objects which her own visions had 
dictated. These involved all the rest. Errors were now less 
important ; and doubtless it had now become more difficult 
for herself to pronounce authentically what were errors. The 



22 DE QUINCEY 

noble girl bad acbieved, as by a rapture of motion, tbe capital 
end of clearing out a free space around her sovereign, giving 
him the power to move his arms with effect ; and, secondly, 
the inappreciable end of winning for that sovereign what 
seemed to all France the heavenly ratification of his rights, by 
crowning him with the ancient solemnities. She had made it 
impossible for the English now to step before her. They were 
caught in an irretrievable blunder, owing partly to discord 
amongst the uncles of Henry VL, partly to a want of funds, but 
partly to the very impossibility which they believed to press 
with tenfold force upon any French attempt to forestall theirs. 
They laughed at such a thought ; and whilst they laughed, 
she did it. Henceforth the single redress for the English of 
this capital oversight, but which never could have redressed it 
effectually, was to vitiate and taint the coronation of Charles 
VH. as the work of a witch. That policy, and not malice (as 
M. Michelet is so happy to believe), was the moving principle 
in the subsequent prosecution of Joanna. Unless they un- 
hinged the force of the first coronation in the popular mind, 
by associating it with power given from hell, they felt that the 
sceptre of the invader was broken. 

XXII. But she, the child that, at nineteen, had wrought 
wonders so great for France, was she not elated 1 Did she 
not lose, as men so often have lost, all sobriety of mind when 
standing upon the pinnacle of success so giddy 1 Let her 
enemies declare. During the progress of her movement, and 
in the centre of ferocious struggles, she had manifested the 
temper of her feelings by the pity which she had everywhere 
expressed for the suffering enemy. She forwarded to the 
English leaders a touching invitation to unite with the 
French, as brothers, in a common crusade against infidels, 
thus opening the road for a soldierly retreat. She interposed 
to protect the captive or the wounded — she mourned over 
the excesses of her countrymen — she threw herself off her 
horse to kneel by the dying English soldier, and to comfort 
him with such ministrations, physical or spiritual, as his 
situation allowed. "Nolebat," says the evidence, "uti ense 



JOAN OF ARC 23 

sno, ant quemquam interficere." She sheltered the English, 
that invoked her aid, in her own quarters. She wept as she 
beheld, stretched on the field of battle, so many brave enemies 
that had died without confession. And, as regarded herself, 
her elation expressed itself thus : — On the day when she had 
finished her work, she wept; for she knew that, when her 
triumphal task was done, her end must be approaching. Her 
aspirations pointed only to a place, which seemed to her more 
than usually full of natural piety, as one in which it would 
give her pleasure to die. And she uttered, between smiles 
and tears, as a wish that inexpressibly fascinated her heart, 
and yet w^as half fantastic, a broken prayer that God would 
return her to the solitudes from which he had drawm her, and 
suffer her to become a shepherdess once more. It was a 
natural prayer, because nature has laid a necessity upon every 
human heart to seek for rest, and to shrink fi^om torment. 
Yet, again, it was a half-fantastic prayer, because, from child- 
hood upwards, visions that she had no power to mistrust, and 
the voices which sounded in her ear for ever, had long since 
persuaded her mind, that for her no such prayer could be 
granted. Too well she felt that her mission must be worked 
out to the end, and that thejjid was now at hand. All went 
wrong from this time. She herself had created \kiQ funds out 
of which the French restoration should grow ; but she was not 
suffered to witness their development, or their prosperous 
application. More than one military plan was entered upon 
which she did not approve. But she still continued to expose 
her person as before. Severe wounds had not taught her 
caution. And at length, in a sortie from Compi^gne (whether 
through treacherous collusion on the part of her own friends 
is doubtful to this day), she was made prisoner by the Bur- 
gundians, and finally surrendered to the English. 

XXII I. Now came her trial. This trial, moving of course 
under English influence, was conducted in chief by the Bishop 
of Beauvais. He was a Frenchman, sold to English interests, 
and hoping, by favour of the English leaders, to reach the high- 
est preferment. Bishop that art, Archbishop tlmt shalt he. 



24 DE QUINCE Y 

Cardinal that may est be, were the words that sounded con- 
tinually in his ear ; and doubtless a whisper of visions still 
higher, of a triple crown, and feet upon the necks of kings, 
sometimes stole into his heart. M. Michelet is anxious to 
keep us in mind that this bishop was but an agent of the 
English. True. But it does not better the case for his 
countryman — that, being an accomplice in the crime, making 
himself the leader in the persecution against the helpless girl, 
he was willing to be all this in the spirit, and with the con- 
scious vileness of a cat's-paw. Never from the foundations of 
the earth was there such a trial as tbis, if it were laid open in 
all its beauty of defence, and all its hellishness of attack. 
Oh, child of France ! shepherdess, peasant girl ! trodden 
under foot by all around thee, how I honour thy flashing in- 
tellect, quick as God's lightning, and true as God's lightning 
to its mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by 
many a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and 
making dumb the oracles of falsehood ! Is it not scandalous, 
is it not humiliating to civilisation, that, even at this day, 
France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges examining the 
prisoner against himself; seducing him, by fraud, into treach- 
erous conclusions against his own head ; using the terrors of 
their power for extorting confessions from the frailty of hope ; 
nay (which is worse), using the blandishments of condescension 
and snaky kindness for thawing into compliances of gratitude 
those whom they had failed to freeze into terror 1 Wicked 
judges! Barbarian jurisprudence ! that, sitting in your own 
conceit on the summits of social wisdom, have yet failed to 
learn the first principles of criminal justice; sit ye humbly 
and with docility at the feet of this girl from Domrdmy, that 
tore your webs of cruelty into shreds and dust. '* Would you 
examine me as a witness against myself? " was the question 
by which many times she defied their arts. Continually she 
showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any busi- 
ness before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous 
charges against her. General questions were proposed to her 
on points of casuistical divinity ; two-edged questions, which 



JOAN OF ARC 25 

not one of themselves could have answered, without, on the 
one side, landing himself in heresy (as then interpreted), or, 
on the other, in some presumptuous expression of self-esteem. 
Next came a wretched Dominican, that pressed her with an 
objection, which, if applied to the Bible, would tax every one 
of its miracles with unsoundness. The monk had the excuse 
of never having read the Bible. M. Michelet has no such ex- 
cuse ; and it makes one blush for him, as a philosopher, to find 
him describing such an argument as " weighty," whereas it 
is but a varied expression of rude Mahometan metaphysics. 
Her answer to this, if there were room to place the whole in a 
clear hght, was as shattering as it was rapid. Another thought 
to entrap her by asking what language the angelic visiters of 
her solitude had talked ; as though heavenly counsels could 
want polyglot interpreters for every word, or that God needed 
language at all in whispering thoughts to a human heart. 
Then came a worse devil, who asked her whether the archangel 
Michael had appeared naked. Not comprehending the vile 
insinuation, Joanna, whose poverty suggested to her sim- 
plicity that it might be the costliness of suitable robes which 
caused the demur, asked them if they fancied God, who 
clothed the flowers of the valleys, unable to find raiment for 
his servants. The answer of Joanna moves a smile of tender- 
ness, but the disappointment of her judges makes one laugh 
exultingly. Others succeeded by troops, who upbraided her 
with leaving her father ; as if that greater Father, whom she 
believed herself to have been serving, did not retain the power 
of dispensing with his own rules, or had not said, that for 
a less cause than martyrdom, man and woman should leave 
both father and mother. 

XXIV. On Easter Sunday, when the trial had been long 
proceeding, the poor girl fell so ill as to cause a belief that 
she had been poisoned. It was not poison. Nobody had any 
interest in hastening a death so certain. M. Michelet, whose 
sympathies with all feelings are so quick, that one would 
gladly see them always as justly directed, reads the case 
most truly. Joanna had a twofold malady. She was visited 



26 DE QUINCE Y 

by a paroxysm of the complaint called home-sickness ; the cruel 
nature of her imprisonment, and its length, could not but 
point her solitary thoughts, in darkness and in chains (for 
chained she was), to Domrcmy. And the season, which was 
the most heavenly period of the spring, added stings to this 
yearning. That was one of her maladies — nostalgia, as med- 
icine calls it ; the other was weariness and exhaustion from 
daily combats with malice. She saw that everybody hated her, 
and thirsted for her blood ; nay, many kind-hearted creatures 
that would have pitied her profoundly, as regarded all political 
charges, had their natural feelings warped by the belief that 
she had dealings with fiendish powers. She knew she was to 
die ; that was not the misery : the misery was, that this con- 
summation could not be reached without so much interme- 
diate strife, as if she were contending for some chance (where 
chance was none) of happiness, or were dreaming for a 
moment of escaping the inevitable. Why, then, did she con- 
tend 1 Knowing that she would reap nothing from answering 
her persecutors, why did she not retire by silence from the 
superfluous contest ? It was because her quick and eager 
loyalty to truth would not suffer her to see it darkened by 
frauds, which she could expose, but others, even of candid 
listeners, perhaps, could not; it was through that imperish- 
able grandeur of soul, which taught her to submit meekly and 
without a struggle to her punishment, but taught her not to 
submit — no, not for a moment — to calumny as to facts, or 
to misconstruction as to motives. Besides, there were secre- 
taries all around the court taking down her words. That was 
meant for no good to her. But the end does not always cor- 
respond to the meaning. And Joanna might say to herself — 
these words that will be used against me to-morrow and the 
next day, perhaps, in some nobler generation may rise again 
for my justification. Yes, Joanna, they (ire rising even now 
in Paris, and for more than justification. 

XXV. "Woman, sister — there are some things which you do 
not execute as well as your brother, man ; no, nor ever will. 
Pardon me, if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great 



JOAN OF ARC 27 

poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael 
Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great scholar. By which 
last is meant — not one who depends simply on an infinite 
memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of com- 
bination; bringing together from the four winds, like the 
angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's 
bones, into the unity of breathing life. If you can create your- 
selves into any of these great creators, why have you not 1 

XXVI. Yet, sister woman, though I cannot consent to find 
a Mozart or a Michael Angelo in your sex, cheerfully, and with 
the love that burns in depths of admiration, I acknowledge 
that you can do one thing as well as the best of us men — a 
greater thing than even Milton is known to have done, or 
Michael Angelo — you can die grandly, and as goddesses 
would die, were goddesses mortal. If any distant worlds 
(which maij be the case) are so far ahead of us Tellurians in 
optical resources, as to see distinctly through their telescopes 
all that we do on earth, what is the grandest sight to which 
we ever treat them ? St. Peter's at Pvome, do you fancy, on 
Easter Sunday, or Luxor, or perhaps the Himalayas 1 Oh 
no ! my friend : suggest something better ; these are baubles 
to them ; they see in other worlds, in their own, far better 
toys of the same kind. These, take my word for it, are 
nothing. Do you give it up? The finest thing, then, we 
have to show them is a scaffold on the morning of execution. 
I assure you there is a strong muster in those far telescopic 
worlds, on any such morning, of those who happen to find 
themselves occupying the right hemisphere for a peep at us. 
How, then, if it be announced in some such telescopic world 
by those who make a livelihood of catching glimpses at our 
newspapers, whose language they have long since deciphered, 
that the poor victim in the morning's sacrifice is a woman ? 
How, if it be published in that distant world, that the sufferer 
wears upon her head, in the eyes of many, the garlands of 
martyrdom 1 How, if it should be some Marie Antoinette, 
the widowed queen, coming forward on the scaffold, and pre- 
senting to the morning air her head, turned grey by sorrow, 



28 DE QUINCE Y 

daughter of Csesars kneeling down humbly to kiss the guil- 
lotine, as one that worships death 1 How, if it were the 
noble Charlotte Corday, that in the bloom of youth, that with 
the loveliest of persons, that with homage waiting upon her 
smiles wherever she turned her face to scatter them — 
homage that followed those smiles as surely as the carols of 
birds, after showers in spring, follow the reappearing sun and 
the racing of sunbeams over the hills — yet thought alJ these 
things cheaper than the dust upon her sandals, in comparison 
of deliverance from hell for her dear suffering France ! Ah ! 
these were spectacles indeed for those sympathising people 
in distant worlds ; and some, perhaps, would suffer a sort of 
mart3rrdom themselves, because they could not testify their 
wrath, could not bear witness to the strength of love and to 
the fury of hatred that burned within them at such scenes ; 
could not gather into golden urns some of that glorious dust 
which rested in the catacombs of earth. 

XXVII. On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, 
being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc 
underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before mid- 
day, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of 
prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets supported by 
occasional walls of lath and plaster, and traversed by hollow 
spaces in every direction for the creation of air-currents. The 
pile "struck terror," says M. Michelet, "by its height"; and, 
as usual, the English purpose in this is viewed as one of pure 
malignity. But there are two ways of explaining all that. It 
is probable that the purpose was merciful. On the circum- 
stances of the execution I shall not linger. Yet, to mark the 
almost fatal felicity of M. Michelet in finding out whatever 
may injure the English name, at a moment ^^hen every reader 
will be interested in Joanna's personal appearance, it is really 
edifying to notice the ingenuity by which he draws into light 
from a dark corner a very unjust account of it, and neglects, 
though lying upon the highroad, a very pleasing one. Both 
are from English pens. Grafton, a chronicler, but little read, 
being a stiffnecked John Bull, thought fit to say, that no 



JOAN OF ARC 29 

wonder Joanna should be a virgin, since her " foule face " was 
a satisfactory solution of that particular merit. Holinshead, 
on the other hand, a chronicler somewhat later, every way 
more important, and at one time universally read, has given a 
very pleasing testimony to the interesting character of Joanna's 
person and engaging manners. Neither of these men lived 
till the following century, so that personally this evidence is 
none at all. Grafton sullenly and carelessly believed as he 
wished to believe ; Holinshead took pains to inquire, and re- 
ports undoubtedly the general impression of France. But I 
cite the case as illustrating M. Michelet's candour.-^ 

1 Amongst the many ebullitions of M. Michelet's fury against us poor 
English, are four which will be likely to amuse the reader ; and they are 
the more conspicuous in collision with the justice which he sometimes does 
us, and the very indignant admiration which, under some aspects, he 
grants to us. 

1. Our English literature he admires with some gnashing of teeth. 
He pronounces it "fine and sombre," but, I lament to add, "sce])tical, 
Judaic, Satanic — in a word, antichristian," That Lord Byron should 
figure as a member of this diabolical corporation, will not surprise men. 
It ivill surprise them to hear that Milton is one of its Satanic leaders. 
Many are the generous and eloquent Frenchmen, besides Chateaubriand, 
who have, in the course of the last thirty years, nobly suspended their own 
burning nationality, in order to render a more rapturous homage at the 
feet of Milton ; and some of them have raised Milton almost to a level with 
angelic natures. Not one of them has thought of looking for him below 
the earth. As to Shakspere, j\l. Michelet detects in him a most extraor- 
dinary mare's nest. It is this: he does "not recollect to have seen the 
name of God " in any part of his works. On reading such words, it is 
natural to rub one's eyes, and suspect that all one has ever seen in this 
world may have been a pure ocular delusion. In particular, I begin my- 
self to suspect that the word " Za gloire" never occurs in any Parisian 
journal. "The great English nation," says M. Michelet, "has one im- 
mense profound vic'e," to wit, "pride." Why, really, that may be true ; 
but we have a neighbour not absolutely clear of an "immense profound 
vice," as like ours in colour and shape as cherry to cherry. In short, M. 
Michelet thinks us, by fits and starts, admirable, only that we are detest- 
able ; and he would adore some of our authors, were it not that so intensely 
he could have wished to kick them. 

2, M. Michelet thinks to lodge an arrow in our sides by a very odd re- 
mark upon Thomas a Kempis : which is, that a man of any conceivable 



30 DE QUINCE Y 

XXVIII. TI18 circumstantial incidents of the execution, 
unless with more space than I can now command, I should be 
unwilling to relate. I should fear to injure, by imperfect re- 
port, a martyrdom which to myself appears so unspeakably 

European blood — a Finlander, suppose, or a Zantiote — might have Avrit- 
ten Tom, only not an Englishman. Whether an Englishman could have 
forged Tom, must remain a matter of doubt, unless the thing had been tried 
long ago. That problem was intercepted for ever by Tom's perverseness in 
choosing to manufacture himself. Yet, since nobody is better aware than 
M. Michelet that this very jjoint of Kempis having manufactured Kempis 
is furiously and hopelessly litigated, three or four nations claiming to have 
forged his work for him, the shocking old doubt will raise its snaky head 
once more — whether this forger, who rests in so much darkness, might 
not, after all, be of English blood. Tom, it may be feared, is known to 
modern English literature chiefly by an irreverent mention of his name 
in a line of Peter Pindar's (Dr. Wolcot) fifty years back, where he is 
described as 

" Kem]>is Tom, 
Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come." 

Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of 
John Wesley. Amongst those few, however, happens to be myself ; which 
arose from the accident of having, when a bo}'' of eleven, received a copy of 
the "De Imitatione Christi" as a bequest from a relation who died very 
young ; from which cause, and from the external prettiness of the book, 
being a Glasgow reprint by the celebrated Foulis, and gaily bound, I was 
induced to look into it ; and finally read it many times over, partly out of 
some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with its simplicity and 
devotional fervour ; but much more from the savage delight I found in 
laughing at Tom's Latinity. That, I freely grant to M. Michelet, is in- 
imitable. Yet, after all, it is not certain whether the original v;as Latin. 
But, however tJiat may have been, if it is possible that M. Michelet 1 can 
be accurate in saying that there are no less than sixty French versions (not 
editions, observe, but separate versions) existing of the " De Imitatione," 



1 " If M. Michelet can be accurate": — However, on consideration, this statement 
docs not depend on Michelet. Tlie bibliographer Barbier has absolutely specified sixty 
in a separate dissci'tation, soixnMe traductions, amongst tliose even that have not es- 
caped tlie search. Tlie Italian translations arc said to be thirty. As to mere editions, 
not counting the early MttS. for halt'-a-century before printing was introduced, those in 
Latin amount to two thousand, and those in French to one thousand. Meantime, it is 
very clear to me that this astonishing popularity, so entirely uniiaralleled in literature, 
could not have existed except in Roman Catholic times, nfir subsequently have lingered 
in any Protestant land. It was the denial of Scaipture fountains to thirsty lands which 
made this slender rill of Scriptui'e truth so passionately welcome. 



JOAN OF ARC 31 

grand. Yet for a purpose, pointing not at Joanna, but at M. 
Michelet — viz., to convince him that an Englishman is capa- 
ble of thinking more highly of La Pucelle than even her ad- 
miring countrymen — I shall, in parting, allude to one or two 

how prodigious must liave been the adaptation of the book to the religions 
heart of the fifteenth century ! Excepting the Bible, but excepting that 
only, in Protestant lands, no book known to man has had the same dis- 
tinction. It is the most marvellous bibliographical fact on record. 

3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English 
males in another. None of us men could have written the Opera Omnia 
of Mr. a Kerapis ; neither could any of our girls have assumed male attire 
like La Puccllc. But why ? Because, says Michelet, English girls and 
German think so much of an indecorum. Well, that is a good fault, gen- 
erally speaking. But M. Michelet ought to have remembered a fact in the 
martyrologies which justifies both parties — the French heroine for doing, 
and the general choir of English girls for not doing. A female saint, spe- 
cially renowne'd in France, had, for a reason as weighty as Joanna's — viz., 
expressly to shield her modesty amongst men — worn a male military har- 
ness. That reason and that example authorised La Pacelle ; bxit our Eng- 
lish girls, as a body, have seldom any such reason, and certainly no such 
saintly example, to plead. This excuses them. Yet, still, if it is indis- 
pensable to the national character that our young women should now and 
tlien trespass over the frontier of decorum, it then becomes a patriotic duty 
in me to assure M. Michelet that we have such ardent females amongst us, 
and in a long series — some detected in naval hospitals, when too sick to 
remember their disguise ; some on fields of battle ; multitudes never de- 
tected at all ; some only suspected ; and others discharged without noise 
by war offices and other absurd people. In our navy, both royal and com- 
mercial, and generally from deep remembrances of slighted love, women 
have sometimes served in disguise for many years, taking contentedly tlieir 
daily allowance of burgoo, biscuit, or cannon-balls — anything, in short, 
digestible or indigestible, that it might please Providence to send. One 
thing, at least, is to their credit : never any of these poor masks, with 
their deep silent remembrances, have been detected through murmuring, 
or what is nautically understood by "skulking." So, for once, M. 
Michelet has an erratum to enter upon the fly-leaf of his book in presen- 
tation copies. 

4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We English, at 
Orleans, and after Oileans (which is not quite so extraordinary, if all were 
told), fled before the Maid of Arc.' Yes, says M. Michelet, you did: deny 
it, if you can. Deny it, moii cher? I don't mean to deny it. Running 
away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent, that no philosopher would, 
at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of us nations in Europe, 



32 BE QUINCE Y 

traits in Joanna's demeanour on the scaffold, and to one or 
two in that of the bystanders, which authorise me in question- 
ing an opinion of his upon this martyr's firmness. The reader 
ought to be reminded that Joanna D'Arc was subjected to 
an unusually unfair trial of opinion. Any of the elder Chris- 
tian martyrs had not much to fear of personal rancour. The 
martyr was chiefly regarded as the enemy of Caesar ; at times, 
also, where any knowledge of the Christian faith and morals 
existed, with the enmity that arises spontaneously in the 
worldly against the spiritual. But the martyr, though dis- 
loyal, was not supposed to be therefore anti-national ; and still 
less was mdlvldually hateful. What was hated (if anything) 
belonged to his class, not to himself separately. Now, Joanna, 
if hated at all, was hated personally, and in Rouen on national 
grounds. Hence there would be a certainty of calumny aris- 
ing against her, such as would not affect martyrs in general. 
That being the case, it would follow of necessity that some 
people would impute to her a willingness to recant. No inno- 

without one exception, have shown our philosophy in that way at times. 
Even people, ^^qui ne se rendent pas" have deigned both to run and to 
shout, " Sauve qui pent!" at odd times of sunset ; though, for my part, 
I have no pleasure in recalling unpleasant remenihrances to brave men; 
and yet, really, being so philosophic, they ought not to be unpleasant. 
But the amusing feature in M. Michelet's reproach is the way in which he 
improves and varies against us the charge of running, as if he were singing 
a catch. Listen to him : They ^^ showed their hacks" did these English. 
(Hip, hip, hurrah ! three times three !) ^^ Behind good walls they let them- 
selves he taken." (Hip, hip! nine times nine !) They '"'■ ran as fast as 
their legs could carry them" (Hurrah ! twenty-seven times twenty-seven !) 
They " ran hefore a girl "; they did. (Hurrah ! eighty-one times eiglity- 
one !) This reminds one of criminal indictments on the old model in Eng- 
lish courts, where (for fear the prisoner should escape) the crown lawyer 
varied the charge perhaps through forty counts. Tlie law laid its guns so 
as to rake the accused at every possible angle. Whilst the indictment was 
reading, he seemed a monster of crime in his own eyes ; and yet, after all, 
the poor fellow had but committed one offence, and not always that. 
N. B. — Not having the French original at hand, I make my quotations 
from a friend's copy of Mr. Walter Kelly's translation, which seems to 
me faithful, spirited, and idiomatically English — liable, in fact, only to 
the single reproach of occasional provincialisms. 



JOAN OF ARC 33 

cence could escape that. Now, had she really testified this 
willingness on the scaffold, it would have argued nothing at 
all but the weakness of a genial nature shrinking from the in- 
stant approach of torment. And those will often pity that 
weakness most, who, in their own persons, would yield to it 
least. Meantime, there never was a calumny uttered that 
drew less support from the recorded circumstances. It rests 
upon no positive testimony, and it has a weight of contradict- 
ing testimony to stem. And yet, strange to say, M. Michelet, 
who at times seems to admire the Maid of Arc as much as I 
do, is the one sole writer amongst her friends who lends some 
countenance to this odious slander. His words are, that, if 
she did not utter this word recant with her lips, she uttered 
it in her heart. " Whether she said the word is uncertain : 
but I affirm that she thought it." 

XXIX. Now, I affirm that she did not ; not in any sense of 
the word " thought " applicable to the case. Here is France 
calumniating La Fucelle : here is England defending her. M. 
Michelet can only mean that, on a prioi^i principles, every 
woman must be presumed liable to such a weakness : that 
Joanna was a woman ; ergo, that she was liable to such a 
weakness. That is, he only supposes her to have uttered the 
word by an argument which presumes it impossible for any- 
body to have done otherwise. I, on the contrary, throw the 
onus of the argument not on presumable tendencies of nature, 
but on the known facts of that morning's execution, as re- 
corded by multitudes. What else, I demand, than mere 
weight of metal, absolute nobility of deportment, broke the 
vast line of battle then arrayed against her ? What else but 
her meek, saintly demeanour won, from the enemies that till 
now had believed her a witch, tears of rapturous admiration 1 
"Ten thousand men,"' says M. Michelet himself — "ten 
thousand men wept " ; and of these ten thousand the majority 
were political enemies knitted together by cords of supersti- 
tion. What else was it but her constancy, united with her 
angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic English soldier — 
who had sworn to throw a faggot on her scaffold as his tribute 

3 



34 DE QUINCEY 

of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow — suddenly 
to turn away a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he 
had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes 
where she had stood % What else drove the executioner to 
kneel at every shrine for pardon to his share in the tragedy 1 
And, if all this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act 
of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies, 
against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his 
torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upward 
in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing 
almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw 
not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, 
when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize 
her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only 
for him, the one friend that would not forsake her, and not for 
herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his own 
preservation, but to leave her to God. That girl, whose latest 
breath ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, did 
not utter the word recant either with her lips or in her heart. 
No ; she did not, though one should rise from the dead to 
swear it. 

XXX. Bishop of Beauvais ! thy victim died in fire upon 
a scaffold — thou upon a down bed. But for the departing 
minutes of life, both are oftentimes alike. At the farewell 
crisis, when the gates of death are opening, and flesh is rest- 
ing firom its struggles, oftentimes the tortured and the torturer 
have the same truce fi'om carnal torment ; both sink together 
into sleep ; together both sometimes kindle into dreams. 
When the mortal mists were gathering fast upon you two, 
bishop and shepherd girl — when the pavilions of life were 
closing up their shadowy curtains about you — let us try, 
through the gigantic glooms, to decipher the flying features 
of your separate visions. 

XXXI. The shepherd girl that had delivered France — she, 
from her dungeon, she, from her baiting at the stake, she, from 
her duel with fire, as she entered her last dream — saw Dom- 



JOAN OF ARC 35 

rdmy, saw the fountain of Domrdmy, saw the pomp of forests 
in which her childhood had wandered. That Easter festival, 
which man had denied to her languishing heart — that resur- 
rection of spring-time, which the darkness of dungeons had inter- 
cepted from her, hungering after the glorious liberty of forests 
— were by God given back into her hands as jewels that 
had been stolen from her by robbers. With those, perhaps 
(for the minutes of dreams can stretch into ages), was given 
back to her by God the bhss of childhood. By special privi- 
lege, for her might be created, in this farewell dream, a second 
childhood, innocent as the first ; but not, like that, sad with 
the gloom of a fearful mission in the rear. This mission had 
now been fulfilled. The storm was weathered, the skirts even 
of that mighty storm were drawing off. The blood that she 
was to reckon for had been exacted ; the tears that she was to 
shed in secret had been paid to the last. The hatred to her- 
self in all eyes had been faced steadily, had been suffered, had 
been survived. And in her last fight upon the scaffold she 
had triumphed gloriously ; victoriously she had tasted the 
stings of death. For all, except this comfort from her farewell 
dream, she had died — died amidst the tears of ten thousand 
enemies — died amidst the drums and trumpets of armies — 
died amidst peals redoubling upon peals, volleys upon volleys, 
from the saluting clarions of martyrs. 

XXXII. Bishop of Beauvais ! because the guilt-burdened 
man is in dreams haunted and wa3daid by the most frightful 
of his crimes, and because upon that fluctuating mirror — 
rising (Hke the mocking mirrors of mirage in Arabian deserts) 
from the fens of death — most of all are reflected the sweet 
countenances which the man has laid in ruins ; therefore I 
know, bishop, that you also, entering your final dream, saw 
Domrdmy. That fountain, of which the witnesses spoke so 
much, showed itself to your eyes in pure morning dews : but 
neither dews, nor the holy dawn, could cleanse away the 
bright spots of innocent blood upon its surface. By the 
fountain, bishop, you saw a woman seated, that hid her face. 



36 DE QUINCE Y 

But, as you draw near, the woman raises her wasted features. 
Would Domr^my know them again for the features of her 
child 1 Ah, but you know them, bishop, well ! Oh, mercy ! 
what a groan was that which the servants, waiting outside 
the bishop's dream at his bedside, heard from his labouring 
heart, as at this moment he turned away from the fountain 
and the woman, seeking rest in the forests afar off. Yet not 
so to escape the woman, whom once again he must behold 
before he dies. In the forests to which he prays for pity, 
will he find a respite 1 What a tumult, what a gathering of 
feet is there ! In glades, where only wild deer should run, 
armies and nations are assembling ; towering in the fluctuating 
crowd are phantoms that belong to departed hours. There 
is the great English Prince, Eegent of France. There is my 
Lord of Winchester, the princely cardinal, that died and 
made no sign. There is the Bishop of Beauvais, clinging to 
the shelter of thickets. What building is that which hands 
so rapid are raising $ Is it a martyr's scaffold ? Will they 
burn the child of Domrdmy a second time 1 No : it is a 
tribunal that rises to the clouds; and two nations stand 
around it, waiting for a trial. Shall my Lord of Beauvais sit 
again upon the judgment-seat, and again number the hours 
for the innocent ? Ah no ! he is the prisoner at the bar. 
Already all is waiting : the mighty audience is gathered, the 
Court is hurrying to their seats, the witnesses are arrayed, 
the trumpets are sounding, the judge is taking his place. 
Oh ! but this is sudden. My lord, have you no counsel 1 
"Counsel I have none: in heaven above, or on earth beneath, 
counsellor there is none now that would take a brief from me : 
all are silent." Is it, indeed, come to this? Alas ! the time 
is short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches away 
into infinity, but yet I will search in it for somebody to take 
your brief: I know of somebody that will be your counsel. 
Who is this that cometh from Domrdmy 1 Who is she in 
bloody coronation robes from Bheims ? Who is she that 
cometh with blackened flesh from walking the furnaces of 



JOAN OF ARC 37 

Ronen ? This is she, the shepherd girl, counsellor that had 
none for herself, whom I choose, bishop, for yours. She it is, 
I engage, that shall take my lord's brief. She it is, bishop, 
that would plead for you: yes, bishop, she — when heaven 
and earth are silent. 



TPIE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 



Section the First. — The Glory of Motion 

I. Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at 
Oxford, Mr. Palmer, at that time M. P. for Bath, had accom- 
plished two things, very hard to do on our little planet, 
the Earth, however cheap they may be held by eccentric 
people in comets — he had invented mail-coaches, and he 
had married the daughter^ of a duke. He was, therefore, 
just twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly in- 
vent (or, which is the same thing, -^ discover) the satellites of 
Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in 
the two capital pretensions of speed and keeping time, but, 
on the other hand, who did not marry the daughter of a 
duke. 

II. These mail-coaches, as organised by Mr. Palmer, are 
entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself, having had so 
large a share in developing the anarchies of my subsequent 
dreams ; an agency which they accomplished, 1st, through 
velocity, at that time unprecedented — for they first revealed 
the glory of motion ; 2dly, through grand effects for the eye 
between lamp-light and the darkness upon solitary roads ; 
3dly, through animal beauty and power so often displayed 
in the class of horses selected for this mail service ; 4thly, 
through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, 

1 Lady Madeline Gordon. 

2 " The same thing " ; — Thus, in the calendar of the Church Festivals, 
the discovery of the true cross (by Helen, the mother of Constantine) is 
recorded (and one might think — with the express consciousness of sar- 
casm) as the Invention of the Cross. 



42 DE QUINCE Y 

ill the midst of vast distances ^ — of storms, of darkness, of 
danger — overruled all obstacles into one steady co-operatiun 
to a national result. For my own feeling, this post-office 
service spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a thousand 
instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger 
of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme baton of 
some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like 
that of heart, brain, and lungs, in a healthy animal organisa- 
tion. But, finally, that particular element in this whole 
combination which most impressed myself, and through 
which it is that to this hour Mr. Palmer's mail-coach system 
tyrannises over my dreams by terror and terrific beauty, lay 
in the awful j^olitical mission which at that time it fulfilled. 
The mail-coach it was that distributed over the face of the 
land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking 
news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. 
These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, 
redeemed the tears and blood in which they had been sown. 
Neither was the meanest peasant so much below the grandeur 
and the sorrow of the times as to confound battles such 
as these, which were gradually moulding the destinies of 
Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, 
so often no more than gladiatorial trials of national prowess. 
The victories of England in this stupendous contest rose of 
themselves as natural Te Deums to heaven ; and it was felt 
by the thoughtful that such victories, at such a crisis of 
general prostration, were not mo^e beneficial to ourselves 
than finally to France, our enemy, and to the nations of all 
western or central Europe, through whose pusillanimity it 
w^as that the French domination had prospered. 

III. The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing 
these mighty events, thus diffusively influential, became itself 
a spiritualised and glorified object to an impassioned heart; 

1 " Vast distances" : — One case was familiar to mail-coach travellers, 
where two mails in opposite directions, north and south, starting at the 
same minute from points six hundred miles a])art, met ahiiost constantly 
at a particular bridge which bisected the total distance. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 43 

and naturally, in the Oxford of that day, all hearts were im- 
passioned, as being all (or nearly all) in early manhood. In 
most universities there is one single college ; in Oxford there 
were five-and- twenty, all of which were peopled by young 
men, the elite of their own generation ; not boys, but men ; 
none under eighteen. In- some of these many colleges, the 
custom permitted the student to keep what are called " short 
terms" ; that is, the four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, 
and Act, were kept by a residence, in the aggregate, of 
ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under this interrupted 
residence, it was possible that a student might have a reason 
for going down to his home four times in the year. This 
made eight journeys to and fro. But, as these homes lay dis- 
persed through all the shires of the island, and most of us 
disdained all coaches except his majesty's mail, no city out of 
London could pretend to so extensive a connection with Mr. 
Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Three mails, at the least, 
I remember as passing every day through Oxford, and bene- 
fiting by my personal patronage — viz., the Worcester, the 
Gloucester, and the Holyhead mail. Naturally, therefore, it 
became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys re- 
volved every six weeks on an average, to look a little into the 
executive details of the system. With some of these Mr. 
Palmer had no concern ; they rested upon bye-laws enacted 
by postnig houses for their own benefit, and upon other bye- 
laws, equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the 
illustration of their own haughty exclusiveness. These last 
were of a nature to rouse our scorn, from which the transition 
was not very long to systematic mutiny. Up to this time, 
say 1804, or 1805 (the year of Trafalgar), it had been the 
fixed assumption of the four inside people (as an old tradition 
of all public carriages derived from the reign of Charles II.), 
that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain 
variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been 
compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the 
three misera jle delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an 
outsider, might have been held to attaint the foot concerned 



44 DE QUINCE r 

in that operation ; so that, perhaps, it would have required an 
act of Parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, 
then, could express the horror, and the sense of treason, in 
that case which had happened, where all three outsides (the 
trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at the 
same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated 
four 1 I myself witnessed such an attempt ; and on that oc- 
casion a benevolent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his 
three holy associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were 
indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the 
court would regard it as a case of lunacy, or delirium tremens, 
rather than of treason. England owes much of her grandeur 
to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composi- 
tion, when pulling against her strong democracy. I am not 
the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it ex- 
pressed itself in comic shapes. The course taken with the 
infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have 
noticed, was, that the waiter, beckoning them away from the 
privileged salle-a-manger, sang out, "This way, my good 
men," and then enticed these good men away to the kitchen. 
But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though 
rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger 
than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to 
budge, and so far carried their point as to have a separate 
table arranged for themselves in a corner of the general room. 
Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough to 
plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or dais, it 
then became possible to assume as a fiction of law — that the 
three delf fellows, after all, were not present. They could be 
ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim, that objects 
not appearing, and not existing, are governed by the same 
logical construction.^ 

IV. Such being, at that time, the usages of mail-coaches, 

what was to be done by us of young Oxford % We, the most 

aristocratic of people, who were addicted to 'he practice of 

looking down superciliously even upon the insia^^s themselves 

1 Be, non apparentibus, d:G. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 45 

as often very questionable characters — were we, by volun- 
tarily going outside, to court indignities ? If our dress and 
bearing sheltered us, generally, from the suspicion of being 
"raff" (the name at that period for " snobs " ^) we really 
were such constructively, by the place we assumed. If we 
did not submit to the deep shadow of eclipse, we entered at 
least the skirts of its penumbra. And the analogy of theatres 
was valid against us, where no man can complain of the an- 
noyances incident to the pit or gallery, having his instant 
remedy in paying the higher price of the boxes. But the 
soundness of this analogy we disputed. In the case of the 
theatre, it cannot be pretended that the inferior situations 
have any separate attractions, unless the pit may be supposed 
to have an advantage for the purposes of the critic or the 
dramatic reporter. But the critic or reporter is a rarity. 
For most people, the sole benefit is in the price. Now, on 
the contrary, the outside of the mail had its own incommuni- 
cable advantages. These we could not forego. The higher 
price we would willingly have paid, but not the price con- 
nected with the condition of riding inside ; which condition 
we pronounced insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, 
the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat — these 
were what we required ; but, above all, the certain anticipa- 
tion of purchasing occasional opportunities of driving. 

V. Such was the difficulty which pressed us ; and under 
the coercion of this difficulty, we instituted a searching in- 
quiry into the true quality and valuation of the different 
apartments about the mail. We conducted this inquiry on 
metaphysical principles ; and it was ascertained satisfactorily, 
that the roof of the coach, which by some weak men had been 
called the attics, and by some the garrets, was in reality the 
drawing-room ; in which drawing-room the box was the chief 

1 '' Snohs," and its antithesis, ''nobs," arose among the internal factions 
of shoemakers perhaps ten years later. Possibly enough, the terms may 
have existed much earlier ; but they were then first made known, pictur- 
esquely and effectively, by a trial at some assizes which happened to fix 
the public attention. 



46 DE QUINCE Y 

ottoman or sofa ; whilst it appeared that the inside, which 
had been traditionally regarded as the only room tenantable 
by gentlemen, was, in fact, the coal-cellar in disguise. 

VI. Great wits jump. The very same idea had not long 
before struck the celestial intellect of China. Amongst the 
presents carried out by our first embassy to that country was 
a state-coach. It had been specially selected as a personal 
gift by George III. ; but the exact mode of using it was an 
intense mystery to Pekin. The ambassador, indeed (Lord 
Macartney), had made some imperfect explanations upon 
this point ; but, as his excellency communicated these in a 
diplomatic whisper, at the very moment of his departure, the 
celestial intellect was very feebly illuminated, and it became 
necessary to call a cabinet council on the grand state ques- 
tion, " Where was the Emperor to sit 1 " The hammer-cloth 
happened to be unusually gorgeous ; and partly on that con- 
sideration, but partly also 'because the box offered the most 
elevated seat, was nearest to the moon, and undeniably went 
foremost, it was resolved by acclamation that the box was the 
imperial throne, and for the scoundrel who drove, he might 
sit where he could find a perch. The horses, therefore, being 
harnessed, solemnly his imperial majesty ascended his new 
English throne under a flourish of trumpets, having the first 
lord of the treasury on his right hand, and the chief jester 
on his left. Pekin gloried in the spectacle; and in the whole 
flowery people, constructively present by representation, there 
was but one discontented person, and that was the coachman. 
This mutinous individual audaciously shouted, " Where am / 
to sit ? " But the privy council, incensed by his disloyalty, 
unanimously opened the door, and kicked him into the inside. 
He had all the inside places to himself; but such is the rapacity 
of ambition, that he was still dissatisfied. " I say," he cried out 
in an extempore petition, addressed to the emperor through 
the window — " I say, how am I to catch hold of the reins ? " 
— "Anyhow," was the imperial answer; "don't trouble me, 
man, in my glory. How catch the reins? Why, through 
the windows, through the keyholes — rt>?j/how." Finally 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 47 

this contumacious coachman lengthened the check-strings 
into a sort of jury-reins, communicating with the horses ; with 
these he drove as steadily as Pekin had any right to expect. 
The emperor returned after the briefest of circuits ; he de- 
scended in great pomp from his throne, with the severest 
resolution never to remount it. A public thanksgiving was 
ordered for his majesty's happy escape from the disease of 
broken neck ; and the state-coach was dedicated thencefor- 
ward as a votive offering to the god Fo, Fo — whom the 
learned more accurately called Fi, Fi. 

VI I. A revolution of this same Chinese character did young 
Oxford of that era effect in the constitution of mail-coach 
society. It was a perfect French revolution; and we had 
good, reason to say, (^a ira. In fact, it soon became too popu- 
lar. The " public " — a well known character, particularly 
disagreeable, though slightly respectable, and notorious for 
affecting the chief seats in synagogues — had at first loudly 
opposed this revolution ; but when the opposition showed 
itself to be ineffectual, our disagreeable friend went into it 
with headlong zeal. At first it was a sort of race between 
us ; and, as the public is usually from thirty to fifty years 
old, naturally we of young Oxford, that averaged about 
twenty, had the advantage. Then the public took to bribing, 
giving fees to horse-keepers, &c., who hired out their persons 
as warming-pans on the box-seat. That, you know, was 
shocking to all moral sensibilities. Come to bribery, said 
we, and there is an end to all morality, Aristotle's, Zeno's, 
Cicero's, or anybody's. And, besides, of what use w^as it 1 
For we bribed also. And as our bribes to those of the pubKc 
were as five shillings to sixpence, here again young Oxford 
had the advantage. But the contest was ruinous to the 
principles of the stables connected with the mails. This 
whole corporation was constantly bribed, rebribed, and often 
sur-rebribed ; a mail-coach yard was like the hustings in a 
contested election ; and a horse-keeper, ostler, or helper, was 
held by the philosophical at that time to be the most corrupt 
character in the nation. 



48 DE QUINCE Y 

VIII. There was an impression upon the public mind, natural 
enough from the continually augmenting velocity of the mail, 
but quite erroneous, that an outside seat on this class of car- 
riages was a post of danger. On the contrary, I maintained 
that, if a man had become nervous from some gipsy prediction 
in his childhood, allocating to a particular moon now approach- 
ing some unknown danger, and he should inquire earnestly, 
" Whither can I fly for shelter ? Is a prison the safest retreat ? 
or a lunatic hospital ? or the British Museum % " I should 
have replied, "Oh, no ; I '11 tell you what to do. Take lodg- 
ings for the next forty days on the box of his majesty's mail. 
Nobody can touch you there. If it is by bills at ninety days 
after date that you are made unhappy — if noters and pro- 
testers are the sort of wretches whose astrological shadows 
darken the house of life — then note you what I vehemently 
protest — viz., that no matter though the sheriff and under- 
sheriff in every county should be running after you with his 
posse, touch a hair of your head he cannot whilst you keep 
house, and have your legal domicile on the box of the mail. 
It is felony to stop the mail ; even the sheriff cannot do that. 
And an ext7'a touch of the whip to the leaders (no great matter 
if it grazes the sheriff) at any time guarantees your safety." 
In fact, a bedroom in a quiet house seems a safe enough re- 
treat, yet it is liable to its own notorious nuisances — to robbers 
by night, to rats, to fire. But the mail laughs at these terrors. 
To robbers, the answer is packed up and ready for delivery in 
the barrel of the guard's blunderbuss. Rats again !— there are 
none about mail-coaches, any more than snakes in Von Troil's 
Iceland ; ^ except, indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat; 
who always hides his shame in what I have shown to be the 
"coal cellar." And as to fire, I never knew but one in a 
mail-coach, which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an 
obstinate sailor bound to Devonport. Jack, making light of 

1 " Von TroiVs Iceland'': — The allusion is to a well-known chapter 
in Von Troil's work, entitled, " Concerning the Snakes of Iceland." The 
entire chapter consists of these six words — *' There are no snakes in 
Iceland." 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 49 

the law and the lawgiver that had set their faces against his 
offence, insisted on taking up a forbidden seat ^ in the rear of 
the roof, from which he could exchange his own yarns with 
those of the guard. No greater offence was then known to 
mail-coaches ; it was treason, it was Iwsa majestas, it was by 
tendency arson ; and the ashes of Jack's pipe, falling amongst 
the straw of the hinder boot, containing the mail-bags, raised 
El flame which (aided by the wind of our motion) threatened 
a revolution in the republic of letters. Yet even this left 
the sanctity of the box unviolated. In dignified repose, the 
3oachman and myself sat on, resting with benign composure 
upon our knowledge that the fire would have to burn its way 
through four inside passengers before it could reach ourselves. 
[ remarked to the coachman, with a quotation from Virgil's 
"^neid " really too hackneyed — 

" Jam proximus ardet 
Ucalegon." 

But, recollecting that the Virgilian part of the coachman's 
gducation might have been neglected, I interpreted so far as 
bo say, that perhaps at that moment the flames were catching 

1 "■Forbidden seat'': — The. very sternest code of rules was enforced 
upon the mails by the Post-office. Throughout England, only three out- 
sides were allowed, of whom one was to sit on the box, and the other two 
immediately behind the box : none, under any pretext, to come near the 
L^uard ; an indispensable caution ; since else, under the guise of a passenger, 
X robber might by any one of a thousand advantages — which sometimes 
are created, but always are favoured, by the animation of frank social in- 
tercourse — have disarmed the guard. Beyond the Scottish border, the 
regulation was so far relaxed as to allow of four outsides, but not relaxed 
at all as to the mode of placing them. One, as before, was seated on the 
box, and the other three on the front of the roof, with a determinate and 
ample separation from the little insulated chair of the guard. This relaxa- 
tion was conceded by way of compensating to Scotland her disadvantages 
in point of population. England, by the superior density of her popula- 
tion, might always count upon a large fund of profits in the fractional 
ti'ips of chance passengers riding for short distances of two or three stages. 
In Scotland, this chance counted for much less. And therefore, to make 
good the deficiency, Scotland was allowed a compensatory profit upon one 
zxtra passenger. 

4 



50 BE QUINCE Y 

hold of our worthy brother and inside passenger, Ucalegon. 
The coachman made no answer, which is my own way when a 
stranger addresses me either in Syriac or in Coptic, but by his 
faint sceptical smile he seemed to insinuate that he knew 
better ; for that Ucalegon, as it happened, was not in the way- 
bill, and therefore could not have been booked. 

IX. No dignity is perfect which does not at some point 
ally itself with the mysterious. The connection of the mail 
with the state and the executive government — a connection 
obvious, but yet not strictly defined — gave to the whole mail 
establishment an official grandeur which did us service on the 
roads, and invested us with seasonable terrors. Not the less 
impressive were those terrors, because their legal limits were 
imperfectly ascertained. Look at those turnpike gates ; with 
what deferential hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly 
open at our approach ! Look at that long line of carts and 
carters ahead, audaciously usurping the very crest of the road. 
Ah ! traitors, they do not hear us as yet ; but, as soon as the 
dreadful blast of our horn reaches them with proclamation of 
our approach, see with what frenzy of trepidation they fly to 
their horses' heads, and deprecate our wrath by the precipi- 
tation of their crane-neck quarterings. Treason they feel to 
be their crime ; each individual carter feels himself under the 
ban of confiscation and attainder ; his blood is attainted 
through six generations ; and nothing is wanting but the 
headsman and his axe, the block and the saw-dust, to close 
up the vista of his horrors. What ! shall it be within benefit 
of clergy to delay the king's message on the highroad ? — to 
interrupt the great respirations, ebb and flood, systole and 
diastole, of the national intercourse ? — to endanger the 
safety of tidings, running day and night between all nations 
and languages ? Or can it be fancied, amongst the weakest 
of men, that the bodies of the criminals will be given up to 
their widows for Christian burial ? Now the doubts which were 
raised as to our powers did more to wrap them in terror, by 
wrapping them in uncertainty, than could have been effected 
by the sharpest definitions of the law from the Quarter 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 51 

Sessions. We, on our parts (we, the collective mail, I mean), 
did our utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the inso- 
lence with which we wielded them. Whether this insolence 
rested upon law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious 
power that haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it 
spoke from a potential station ; and the agent, in each partic- 
ular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as one 
having authority. 

X. Sometimes after breakfast his majesty's mail would 
become frisky; and, in its difficult wheelings amongst the 
intricacies of early markets, it would upset an apple-cart, 
a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the affliction and 
dismay, awful was the smash. I, as far as possible, en- 
deavoured in such a case to represent the conscience and 
moral sensibilities of the mail ; and, when wildernesses of eggs 
were lying poached under our horses' hoofs, then would I 
stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words too cele- 
brated at that time, from the false echoes ^ of Marengo), 
"Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep over you?" 
which was evidently impossible, since, in fact, we had not time 
to laugh over them. Tied to post-office allowance, in some 
cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, could the royal mail 
pretend to undertake the offices of sympathy and condolence ? 
Could it be expected to provide tears for the accidents of the 
road ? If even it seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I 
felt, in discharge of its own more peremptory duties. 

XL Upholding the morality of the mail, a fortiori I upheld 
its rights ; as a matter of duty, I stretched to the uttermost 
its privilege of imperial precedency, and astonished weak 
minds by the feudal powers which I hinted to be lurking 
constructively in the charters of this proud establishment. 

1 '^ False echoes" : — Yes, false ! for the words ascribed to Napoleon, 
as breathed to the memory of Desaix, never were nttered at all. . They 
stand in the same category of theatrical fictions as the cry of the fonnder- 
ing line-of-battle ship Vengeur, as the vaunt of General Cambronne at 
Waterloo, *' La Garde meurt, mats ne se rend pas," or as the repartees of 
Talleyrand. 



52 DE QUINCE Y 

Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail, 
between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing 
from Birmingham, some " Tallyho " or " Highflyer," all 
flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us. 
What a contrast to our royal simplicity of form and colour 
in this plebeian wretch 1 The single ornament on our dark 
ground of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the im- 
perial arms, but emblazoned in proportions as modest as a 
signet-ring bears to a seal of office. Even this was displayed 
only on a single panel, whispering, rather than proclaiming, 
our relations to the mighty state; whilst the beast from 
Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend from false, fleeting, 
perjured Brummagem, had as much writing and painting on 
its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from 
the tombs of Luxor. For some time this Birmingham ma- 
chine ran along by our side — a piece of familiarity that 
already of itself seemed to me sufficiently Jacobinical. But 
all at once a movement of the horses announced a desperate 
intention of leaving us behind. " Do you see that ? " I said 
to the coachman — "I see," was his short answer. He was 
wide awake, yet he waited longer than seemed prudent ; for 
the horses of our audacious opponent had a disagreeable air 
of freshness and power. But his motive was loyal ; his wish 
was, that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown before 
he froze it. When that seemed right, he unloosed, or, to 
speak by a stronger word, he sjyi-ang, his known resources : 
he slipped our royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting-leopards, 
after the affrighted game. How they could retain such a 
reserve of fiery power after the work they had accomplished, 
seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides the physical 
superiority, was a tower of moral strength, namely the king's 
name, "which they upon the adverse faction wanted." 
Passing them without an effort, as it seemed, we threw them 
into the rear with so lengthening an interval between us, as 
proved in itself the bitterest mockery of their presumption ; 
whilst our guard blew back a shattering blast of triumph, 
that was really too painfully full of derision. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 53 

XII. I mention this little incident for its connection with 
what followed. A Welsh rustic, sitting behind me, asked if 
I had not felt my heart burn within me during the progress 
of the race ? I said, with philosophic calmness, No ; because 
we were not racing with a mail, so that no glory could be 
gained. In fact, it was sufficiently mortifying that such a 
Birmingham thing should dare to challenge us. The Welsh- 
man replied, that he did n't see that ; for that a cat might 
look at a king, and a Brummagem coach might lawfully race 
the Holyhead mail. ^^ Race us, if you like," I replied, 
"though even that has an air of sedition, but not heat us. 
This would have been treason; and for its own sake I am 
glad that the ' Tallyho ' was disappointed." So dissatisfied 
did the Welshman seem with this opinion, that at last I was 
obliged to tell him a very fine story from one of our elder 
dramatists — viz., that once, in some far oriental kingdom 
when the sultan of all the land, with his princes, ladies, and 
chief omrahs, were flying their falcons, a hawk suddenly flew 
at a majestic eagle ; and, in defiance of the eagle's natural 
advantages, in contempt also of the eagle's traditional royalty, 
and before the whole assembled field of astonished spectators 
from Agra and Lahore, killed the eagle on the spot. Amaze- 
ment seized the sultan at the unequal contest, and burning 
admiration for its unparalleled result. He commanded that 
the hawk should be brought before him ; he caressed the 
bird with enthusiasm ; and he ordered that, for the com- 
memoration of his matchless courage, a diadem of gold and 
rubies should be solemnly placed on the hawk's head; but 
then that, immediately after this solemn coronation, the bird 
should be led off" to execution, as the most valiant indeed of 
traitors, but not the less a traitor, as having dared to rise 
rebelliously against his liege lord and anointed sovereign, 
the eagle. " Now," said I to the Welshman, *'to you and 
me, as men of refined sensibilities, how painful it would have 
been that this poor Brummagem brute, the ' Tallyho,' in the 
impossible case of a victory over us, should have been crowned 
with Birmingham tinsel, with paste diamonds, and Roman 



54 DE QUINCE Y 

pearls, and then led off to instant execution." The Welsh- 
man doubted if that could be warranted by law. And, when 
I hinted at the 6th of Edward Longshanks, chap. 18, lor 
regulating the precedency of coaches, as being probably the 
statute relied on for the capital punishment of such offences, 
he replied drily, that if the attempt to pass a mail really were 
treasonable, it was a pity that the " Tally ho " appeared to 
have so imperfect an acquaintance with law. 

XIII. The modern modes of travelling cannot compare 
with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. 
They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, 
but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evi- 
dence ; as, for instance, because somebody sai/s that we have 
gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it 
as a personal experience, or upon the evidence of a result, 
as that actually we find ourselves in York four hours after 
leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a 
result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But, seated 
on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of our- 
selves to indicate the velocity. On this system the word 
was, Non magna loquimu7\ as upon railways, but vivimus. 
Yes, "magna vivimus'' ; we do not make verbal ostentation 
of our grandeurs, we realise our grandeurs in act, and in the 
very experience of life. The vital experience of the glad 
animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question 
of our speed ; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as 
a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind 
insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was 
incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, 
in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating 
hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the 
maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such 
a movement ; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But 
the intervening links that connected them, that spread the 
earthquake of battle into the eyeball of the horse, were 
the heart of man and its electric thriilings — kindling in the 
rapture of the fiery strife, and then propagating its own 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 55 

tumults by contagious shouts and gestures to the heart of 
his servant the horse. 

XIV. But now, on the new system of travelHng, iron tubes 
and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers 
of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power to raise an 
extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken 
up for ever ; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself for- 
ward through the electric sensibility of the horse ; the inter- 
agencies are gone in the mode of communication between the 
horse and his master, out of which grew so many aspects of 
sublimity under accidents of mists that hid, or sudden blazes 
that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight solitudes 
that awed. Tidings, fitted to convulse all nations, must 
henceforwards travel by culinary process ; and the trumpet 
that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart- 
shaking, when heard screaming on the wind, and proclaiming 
itself through the darkness to every village or solitary house 
on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings 
of the boiler. 

XV. Thus have perished multiform openings for public 
expressions of interest, scenical yet natural, in great national 
tidings ; for revelations of faces and groups that could not 
offer themselves amongst the fluctuating mobs of a railway 
station. The gatherings of gazers about a laurelled mail had 
one centre, and acknowledged one sole interest. But the 
crowds attending at a railway station have as little unity as 
running water, and own as many centres as there are separate 
carriages in the train. 

XVI. How else, for example, than as a constant watcher 
for the dawn, and for the London mail that in summer 
months entered about da3^break amongst the lawny thickets 
of Marlborough forest, could st thou, sweet Fanny of the Bath 
road, have become the glorified inmate of my dreams 1 Yet 
Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for face and person that 
perhaps in my whole life I have beheld, merited the station 
which even now, from a distance of forty years, she holds in 
my dreams ; yes, though by links of natural association she 



56 DE QUINCE Y 

brings along with her a troop of dreadful creatures, fabulous 
and not fabulous, that are more abominable to the heart, than 
Fanny and the dawn are delightful. 

XVII. Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, 
lived at a mile's distance from that road ; but came so con- 
tinually to meet the mail, that I on my frequent transits 
rarely missed her, and naturally connected her image with 
the great thoroughfare where only I had ever seen her. Why 
she came so punctually, I do not exactly know ; but I believe 
with some burden of commissions to be executed in Bath, 
which had gathered to her own residence as a central rendez- 
vous for converging them. The mail-coachman who drove 
the Bath mail and wore the royal livery,^ happened to be 
Fanny's gi^andfather. A good man he was, that loved his 
beautiful granddaughter ; and, loving her wisely, was vigilant 
over her deportment in any case where young Oxford might 
happen to be concerned. Did my vanity then suggest that I 
myself, individually, could fall within the line of his terrors 1 
Certainly not, as regarded any physical pretensions that I 
could plead ; for Fanny (as a chance passenger from her own 
neighbourhood once told me) counted in her train a hundred 
and ninety-nine professed admirers, if not open aspirants to 
her favour ; and probably not one of the whole brigade but 
excelled myself in personal advantages. Ulysses even, with 
the unfair advantage of his accursed bow, could hardly have 
undertaken that amount of suitors. So the danger might 
have seemed slight — only that woman is universally aristo- 
cratic ; it is amongst her nobilities of heart that she is so. 
Now, the aristocratic distinctions in my favour might easily 

1 < « TTore the royal livery " ; — The general impression was, that the royal 
livery belonged of right to tlie mail-coachmen as tlieir professional dress. 
But that was an error. To the guard it did belong, I believe, and was 
obviously essential as an official warrant, and as a means of instant 
identification for his person, in the discharge of his important public 
duties. But the coachman, and especially if his place in the series did 
not connect him immediately with London and the General Post-office, 
obtained the scarlet coat only as an honorary distinction after long (or, 
if not long, trying and special) service. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 57 

with Miss Fanny have compensated my physical deficiencies. 
Did I then make love to Fanny 1 Why, yes ; about as much 
love as one could make whilst the mail was changing horses 
— a process which, ten years later, did not occupy above 
eighty seconds; but then — viz., about Waterloo — it occupied 
five times eighty. Now, four hundred seconds offer a field 
quite ample enough for whispering into a young woman's ear 
a great deal of truth, and (by way of parenthesis) some trifle 
of falsehood. Grandpapa did right, therefore, to watch me. 
And yet, as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth, 
in a contest with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly 
would he have watched me had I meditated any evil whispers 
to Fanny ! She, it is my belief, would have protected herself 
against any man's evil suggestions. But he, as the result 
showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities for such 
suggestions. Yet, why not % Was he not active ? Was he 
not blooming ? Blooming he was as Fanny herself. 

" Say, all our praises why should lords " 

Stop, that 's not the line. 

" Say, all our roses why should girls engross ? " 

The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper even 
than his granddaughter's — his being drawn from the ale 
cask, Fanny's from the fountains of the dawn. But, in spite 
of his blooming face, some infirmities he had ; and one partic- 
ularly in which he too much resembled a crocodile. This lay 
in a monstrous inaptitude for turning round. The crocodile, 
I presume, owes that inaptitude to the absurd length of his 
back ; but in our grandpapa it arose rather from the absurd 
breadth of his back, combined, possibly, with some growing 
stiffness in his legs. Now, upon this crocodile infirmity of his 
I planted a human advantage for tendering my homage to 
Miss Fanny. In defiance of all his honourable vigilance, no 
sooner had he presented to us his mighty Jovian back (what 
a field for displaying to mankind his royal scarlet !), whilst 
inspecting professionally the buckles, the straps, and the 



58 DE QUINCE Y 

silvery turrets ^ of his harness, than I raised Miss Fanny's hand 
to my lips, and, by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness 
of my manner, caused her easily to understand how happy it 
would make me to rank upon her list as No. 10 or 12, in 
which case a few casualties amongst her lovers (and observe, 
they hanged liberally in those days) might have promoted me 
speedily to the top of the tree ; as, on the other hand, with 
how much loyalty of submission I acquiesced by anticipation 
in her award, supposing that she should plant me in the very 
rear- ward of her favour, as No. 199 + 1. Most truly I loved 
this beautiful and ingenuous girl ; and had it not been for the 
Bath mail, timing all courtships by post-ofhce allowance, 
heaven only knows what might have come of it. People talk 
of being over head and ears in love ; now, the mail was the 
cause that I sank only over ears in love, which, you know, 
still left a trifle of brain to overlook the whole conduct of the 
affair. 

XVIII. Ah, reader ! when I look back upon those days, it 
seems to me that all things change — all things perish. 
" Perish the roses and the palms of kings " : perish even the 
crowns and trophies of Waterloo : thunder and lightning are 
not the thunder and lightning which I remember. Roses are 
degenerating. The Fannies of our island — though this I say 
with reluctance — are not visibly improving ; and the Bath 
road is notoriously superannuated. Crocodiles, you will say, 
are stationary. Mr. Waterton tells me that the crocodile 
does fiot change ; that a cayman, in fact, or an alligator, is 
just as good for riding upon as he was in the time of the 
Pharaohs. That may be ; but tha reason is that the crocodile 
does not live fast — he is a slow coach. I believe it is gener- 

1 u j'urrets" : — As one who loves and venerates Chaucer for his unri- 
valled merits of tenderness, of pictures(|ue characterisation, and of narrative 
skill, I noticed with great pleasure that the word torrettes is used by him 
to designate the little devices through which the reins are made to pass. 
This same word, in the same exact sense, I heard uniformly used hy 
many scores of illustrious mail-coachmen, to whose confidential friendship 
I had the honour of being admitted in my younger days. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 59 

ally understood among naturalists, that the crocodile is a 
blockhead. It is my own impression that the Pharaohs were 
also blockheads. Now, as the Pharaohs and the crocodile 
domineered over Egyptian society, this accounts for a singular 
mistake that prevailed through innumerable generations on 
the Nile. The crocodile made the ridiculous blunder of sup- 
posing man to be meant chiefly for his own eating. Man, 
taking a different view of the subject, naturally met that mis- 
take by another : he viewed the crocodile as a thing some- 
times to worship, but always to run away from. And this 
continued till Mr. Waterton ^ changed the relations between 
the animals. The mode of escaping from the reptile he 
showed to be, not by running away, but by leaping on its 
back, booted and spurred. The two animals had misunder- 
stood each other. The use of the crocodile has now been 
cleared up — viz., to be ridden ; and the final cause of man is, 
that he may improve the health of the crocodile by riding him 
a fox-hunting before breakfast. And it is pretty certain that 
any crocodile, who has been regularly hunted through the 
season, and is master of the weight he carries, will take a six- 
barred gate now as well as ever he would have done in the 
infancy of the pyramids. 

XIX. If, therefore, the crocodile does not change, all things 
else undeniably do : even the shadow of the pyramids grows 
less. And often the restoration in vision of Fanny and the 
Bath road, makes me too pathetically sensible of that truth. 
Out of the darkness, if I happen to call back the image of 
Fanny, up rises suddenly from a gulf of forty years a rose in 

1 " J/y. Waterton'' : — Had the reader lived through the last genera- 
tion, he would not need to be told that, some thirty or thirty-five years 
back, Mr. Waterton, a distinguished country gentleman of ancient family 
in Northumberland, publicly mounted and rode in top-boots a savage old 
crocodile, that was restive and very impertinent, but all to no purpose. 
The crocodile jibbed and tried to kick, but vainly. He was no more able 
to throw the squire, than Sinbad was to throw the old scoundrel who used 
his back without paying for it, until he discovered a mode (slightly im- 
moral, perhaps, though some think not) of murdering the old fraudulent 
jockey, and so circuitously of unhorsing him. 



60 DE QUINCE Y 

June ; or, if I think for an instant of the rose in June, up 
rises the heavenly face of Fanny. One after the other, like 
the antiphonies in the choral service, rise Fanny and the rose 
in June, then back again the rose in June and Fanny. Then 
come both together, as in a chorus — roses and Fannies, 
Fannies and roses, without end, thick as blossoms in paradise. 
Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet 
and gold, with sixteen capes; and the crocodile is driving 
four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail. And suddenly 
we upon the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured 
with the hours, that mingle with the heavens and the heav- 
enly host. Then all at once we are arrived at Marlborough 
forest, amongst the lovely households ^ of the roe-deer ; the 
deer and their fawns retire into the dewy thickets ; the thick- 
ets are rich with roses ; once again the roses call up the sweet 
countenance of Fanny ; and she, being the granddaughter of a 
crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of semi-legendary animals 
— griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes — till at length the 
whole vision of fighting images crowds into one towering ar- 
morial shield, a vast emblazonry of human charities and hu- 
man loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically 
with unutterable and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, 
as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the fore- 
finger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to 
heaven, where is sculptured the eternal writing which pro- 
claims the frailty of earth and her children. 

GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY. 

XX. But the grandest chapter of our experience, within the 
whole mail-coach service, was on those occasions when we 

1 '^ Households " ; — Roe-deer do not congregate in herds like the fallow 
or the red deer, but by separate families, parents and children ; which 
feature of approximation to the sanctity of human hearths, added to their 
comparatively miniature and graceful proportions, conciliate to them an 
interest of peculiar tenderness, supposing even that this beautiful creature 
is less characteristically impressed with the grandeurs of savage and forest 
life. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 61 

went down from London with the news of victory. A period 
of about ten years stretched from Trafalgar to Waterloo ; the 
second and third years of which period (1806 and 1807) were 
comparatively sterile ; but the other nine (from 1805 to 1815 
inclusively) furnished a long succession of victories ; the least 
of which, in such a contest of Titans, had an inappreciable 
value of position — partly for its absolute interference with 
the plans of our enemy, but still more from its keeping alive 
through central Europe the sense of a deep-seated vulnera- 
bility in France. Even to tease the coasts of our enemy, to 
mortify them by continual blockades, to insult them by cap- 
turing if it were but a baubling schooner under the eyes of 
their arrogant armies, repeated from time to time a sullen 
proclamation of power lodged in one quarter to which the 
hopes of Christendom turned in secret. How much more 
loudly must this proclamation have spoken in the audacity ^ 
of having bearded the elite of their troops, and having beaten 
them in pitched battles ! Five years of life it was worth pay- 
ing down for the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, 
when carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And 
it is to be noted that, from our insular situation, and the 
multitude of our frigates disposable for the rapid transmission 
of intelligence, rarely did any unauthorised rumour steal away 
a prelibation from the first aroma of the regular despatches. 
The government news was generally the earliest news. 

1 '^Audacity" : — Such the French accounted it; and it has struck 
me that Soult would not have been so popular in London, at the period of 
her present Majesty's coronation, or in Manchester, on occasion of his visit 
to that town, if they had been aware of the insolence with which he spoke 
of us in notes written at intervals from the field of Waterloo. As though 
it had been mere felony in our army to look a French one in the face, he 
said in more notes than one, dated from two to four p, m. on the field of 
Waterloo, "Here are the English — we have them; they are caught en 
flagrant delit." Yet no man should have known us better ; no man had 
drunk deeper from the cup of humiliation than Soult had in 1809, when 
ejected by us with headlong violence from Oporto, and pursued through a 
long line of wrecks to the frontier of Spain ; subsequently at Albuera, in 
the bloodiest of recorded battles, to say nothing of Toulouse, he should 
have learned our pretensions. 



62 BE QUINCEY 

XXI. From eight p. m. to fifteen or twenty minutes later, 
imagine the mails assembled on parade in Lombard Street ; 
where, at that time,^ and not in St. Martin's-le-Grand, was 
seated the General Post-office. In what exact strength we 
mustered I do not remember ; but, from the length of each 
separate attelage, we filled the street, though a long one, and 
though we were drawn up in double file. On aruj night the 
spectacle was beautiful. The absolute perfection of all the 
appointments about the carriages and the harness, their 
strength, their brilliant cleanliness, their beautiful simpHcity 
— but, more than all, the royal magnificence of the horses — 
were what might first have fixed the attention. Every car- 
riage, on every morning in the year, was taken down to an 
official inspector for examination — wheels, axles, linchpins, 
pole, glasses, lamps, were all critically probed and tested. 
Every part of every carriage had been cleaned, every horse 
had been groomed, with as much rigour as if they belonged to 
a private gentleman ; and that part of the spectacle offered 
itself always. But the night before us is a night of victory ; 
and, behold ! to the ordinary display, what a heart-shaking 
addition ! — horses, men, carriages, all are dressed in laurels 
and flowers, oak-leaves and ribbons. The guards, as being 
officially his Majesty's servants, and of the coachmen such as 
are within the privilege of the post-office, wear the royal 
liveries of course ; and as it is summer (for all the land 
victories were naturally won in summer), they wear, on this 
fine evening, these liveries exposed to view, without any cover- 
ing of upper coats. Such a costume, and the elaborate ar- 
rangement of the laurels in their hats, dilate their hearts, by 
giving to them openly a personal connection with the great 
news, in which already they have the general interest of 
patriotism. That great national sentiment surmounts and 
quells all sense of ordinary distinctions. Those passengers 
who happen to be gentlemen are now hardly to be distinguished 
as such except by dress ; for the usual reserve of their man- 

1 " ^^ that time ".• — I speak of the era previous to Waterloo. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 



63 



ner in speaking to the attendants has on this night melted 
away. One heart, one pride, one glory, connects every man 
by the transcendent bond of his national blood. The specta- 
tors, who are numerous beyond precedent, express their 
sympathy with these fervent feelings by continual hurrahs 
l-very moment are shouted aloud by the post-office servants 
and summoned to draw up, the great ancestral names of cities 
known to history through a thousand years — Lincoln Win- 
chester Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, 
York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Aber- 
deen — expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity 
of Its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by 
the diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every moment 
you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the mail-bags. 
That sound to each individual mail is the signal for drawino- 
off, which process is the finest part of the entire spectack 
Ihen come the horses into play. Horses ! can these be horses 
that bound off with the action and gestures of leopards i 
What stir ! — what sea-like ferment ! — what a thundering of 
wheels ! — what a trampHng of hoofs ! — what a soundincr of 
trumpets! -what farewell cheers! -what redoubling peals 
of brotherly congratulation, connecting the name of the par- 
ticular mail — " Liverpool for ever ! " — with the name of the 
particular victory — "Badajoz for ever!" or "Salamanca for 
ever!" The half-slumbering consciousness that, all night 
long, and all the next day — perhaps for even a longer period 
— many of these mails, like fire racing along a train of gun- 
powder, will be kindling at every instant new successions of 
burning joy, has an obscure effect of multiplying the victory 
Itself, by multiplying to the imagination into infinity the 
stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to 
be let loose, which from that moment is destined to travel, 
without intermission, westwards for three hundred ^ miles -^ 

1 " Three hundred '/-Of necessity, this scale of measurement, to an 
American, if he happens to be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous 
Accordingly, I remember a case in which an American writer indulcres 
himself in the luxury of a little fibbing, by ascribing to an Englishmari a 



64 DE QUINCE Y 

northwards for six hundred ; and the sympathy of our Lom- 
bard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundredfold by a 
sort of visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering sympathies 
which in so vast a succession we are going to awake. 

XXII. Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and 
issuing into the broad uncrowded avenues of the northern 
suburbs, we soon begin to enter upon our natural pace of ten 
miles an hour. In the broad light of the summer evening, the 
sun, perhaps, only just at the point of setting, we are seen 
from every storey of every house. Heads of every age crowd 
to the windows — young and old understand the language of 
our victorious symbols — and rolling volleys of sympathising 
cheers run along us, behind us, and before us. The beggar, 
rearing himself against the wall, forgets his lameness — real 

pompous account of the Thames, constructed entirely upon American ideas 
of grandeur, and concluding in something like these terms: — " And. sir, 
arriving at London, this mighty father of rivers attains a breadth of at 
least two furlongs, having, in its winding course, traversed the astonishing 
distance of one hundred and seventy miles." And this the candid Amer- 
ican thinks it fair to contrast with the scale of the Mississippi. Now, it 
is hardly worth wlnle to answer a pure fiction gravely, else one might say 
that no Englishman out of Bedlam ever thought of looking in an island 
for the rivers of a continent ; nor, consequently, could have thought of 
looking for the peculiar grandeur of the Thames in the length of its course, 
or in the extent of soil which it drains ; yet, if he had been so absurd, the 
American might have recollected that a river, not to be compared with the 
Thames even as to volume of water — viz., the Tiber — has contrived to 
make itself heard of in this world for twenty-five centuries to an extent not 
reached as yet by any river, however corpulent, of his own land. The 
glory of the Thames is measured by the destiny of the population to which 
it ministers, by the commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the 
empire in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential 
stream. Upon some such scale, and not by a transfer of Columbian stand- 
ards, is the course of our English mails to be valued. The American may 
fancy the effect of his own valuations to our English ears, by supposing the 
case of a Siberian glorifying his countrj^ in these terms : — "These wretches, 
sir, in France and England, cannot march half a mile in any direction 
without finding a house where food can be had and lodging ; whereas, such 
is the noble desolation of our magnificent country, that in many a direction 
for a thousand miles, I will engage that a dog shall not find shelter from a 
snow-storm, nor a wren find an apology for breakfast." 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 65 

or assumed — thinks not of his whining trade, but stands 
erect, with bold exulting smiles, as we pass him. The victory 
has healed him, and says, Be thou whole ! Women and 
children, from garrets alike and cellars, through infinite Lon- 
don, look down or look up with loving eyes upon our gay 
ribbons and our martial laurels ; sometimes kiss their hands ; 
sometimes hang out, as signals of affection, pocket-handker- 
chiefs, aprons, dusters, anything that, by catching the summer 
breezes, will express an aerial jubilation. On the London 
side of Barnet, to which we draw near within a few minutes 
after nine, observe that private carriage which is approaching 
us. The weather being so warm, the glasses are all down ; 
and one may read, as on the stage of a theatre, everything 
that goes on within. It contains three ladies — one likely to 
be "mamma," and two of seventeen or eighteen, who are 
probably her daughters. What lovely animation, what beau- 
tiful unpremeditated pantomime, explaining to us every sylla- 
ble that passes, in these ingenuous girls \ By the sudden 
start and raising of the hands on first discovering our 
laurelled equipage! — by the sudden movement and appeal 
to the elder lady from both of them — and by the heightened 
colour on their animated countenances, we can almost hear 
them saying, " See, see ! Look at their laurels ! Oh, 
mamma ! there has been a great battle in Spain ; and it has 
been a great victory." Li a moment we are on the point 
of passing them. We passengers — I on the box, and the 
two on the roof behind me — raise our hats to the ladies; 
the coachman makes his professional salute with the whip ; the 
guard even, though punctilious on the matter of his dignity as 
an officer under the crown, touches his hat. The ladies move 
to us, in return, with a winning graciousness of gesture ; all 
smile on each side in a way that nobody could misunderstand, 
and that nothing short of a grand national sympathy could so 
instantaneously prompt. Will these ladies say that we are 
nothing to them ? Oh, no ; they will not say that. They can- 
not deny — they do not deny — that for this night they are 
our sisters ; gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate servant, for 

5 



66 DE QUINCEY 

twelve hours to come, we on the outside have the honour to be 
their brothers. Those poor women, again, who stop to gaze 
upon us with delight at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by 
their air of weariness, to be returning from labour — do you 
mean to say that they are washerwomen and charwomen 1 
Oh, my poor friend, you are quite mistaken. I assure you 
they stand in a far higher rank ; for this one night they feel 
themselves by birth-right to be daughters of England, and 
answer to no humbler title. 

XXIII. Every joy, however, even rapturous joy — such is 
the sad law of earth — may carry with it grief, or fear of grief, 
to some. Three miles beyond Barnet, we see approaching us 
another private carriage, nearly repeating the circumstances 
of the former case. Here, also, the glasses are all down — 
here, also, is an elderly lady seated ; but the two daughters 
are missing ; for the single young person sitting by the lady's 
side, seems to be an attendant — so I judge from her dress, 
and her air of respectful reserve. The lady is in mourning ; 
and her countenance expresses sorrow. At first she does not 
look up ; so that I believe she is not aware of our approach, 
until she hears the measured beating of our horses' hoofs. 
Then she raises her eyes to settle them painfully on our 
triumphal equipage. Our decorations explain the case to her 
at once ; but she beholds them with apparent anxiety, or even 
with terror. Some time before this, I, finding it difficult to 
hit a flying mark when embarrassed by the coachman's person 
and reins intervening, had given to the guard a " Courier " 
evening paper, containing the gazette, for the next carriage 
that might pass. Accordingly he tossed it in, so folded that 
the huge capitals expressing some such legend as — glorious 
VICTORY, might catch the eye at once. To see the paper, how- 
ever, at all, interpreted as it was by our ensigns of triumph, 
explained everything ; and, if the guard were right in thinking 
the lady to have received it with a gesture of horror, it could 
not be doubtful that she had sufl'ered some deep personal 
affliction in connection with this Spanish war. 

XXIV. Here, now, was the case of one who, having formerly 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 67 

suffered, might, erroneously perhaps, be distressing herself 
with anticipations of another similar suffering. That same 
night, and hardly three hours later, occurred the reverse case. 
A poor woman, who too probably would find herself, in a day 
or two, to have suffered the heaviest of afflictions by the battle, 
blindly allowed herself to express an exultation so unmeasured 
in the news and its details, as gave to her the appearance 
which amongst Celtic Highlanders is called y^^?/. This was at 
some little town where we changed horses an hour or two 
after midnight. Some fair or wake had kept the people up 
out of their beds, and had occasioned a partial illumination of 
the stalls and booths, presenting an unusual but very impres- 
sive effect. We saw many lights moving about as we drew 
near ; and perhaps the most striking scene on the whole route 
was our reception at this place. The flashing of torches and 
the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically, Bengal 
lights) upon the heads of our horses ; the fine effect of such a 
showery and ghostly illumination falling upon our flowers and 
glittering laurels ^ ; whilst all around ourselves, that formed a 
centre of light, the darkness gathered on the rear and flanks 
in massy blackness ; these optical splendours, together with 
the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture 
at once scenical and affecting, theatrical and holy. As we 
stayed for three or four minutes, I alighted ; and immediately 
from a dismantled stall in the street, where no doubt she had 
been presiding through the earlier part of the night, advanced 
eagerly a middle-aged woman. The sight of my newspaper it 
was that had drawn her attention upon myself The victory 
which we were carrying down to the provinces on this occasion, 
was the imperfect one of Talavera — imperfect for its results, 
such was the virtual treachery of the Spanish general, Cuesta, 
but not imperfect in its ever-memorable heroism. I told her 
the main outline of the battle. The agitation of her enthu- 
siasm had been so conspicuous when listening, and when first 

1 ^^ Glittering laurels" : — I must o"hserve, that the colour o[ green 
suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of Bengal 
lights. 



68 DE QUINCE Y 

applying for information, that I could not but ask her if she 
had not some relative in the Peninsular army. Oh, yes ; her 
only son was there. In what regiment 1 He was a trooper 
in the 2od Dragoons. My heart sank within me as she made 
that answer. This sublime regiment, which an Englishman 
should never mention without raising his hat to their memory, 
had made the most memorable and effective charge recorded 
in military annals. They leaped their horses — ovet^ a trench 
where they could, i?ito it, and with the result of death or 
mutilation, when they could not. What proportion cleared 
the trench is nowhere stated. Those who did, closed up and 
went down upon the enemy with such divinity of fervour 
(I use the word diviniti/ by design : the inspiration of God 
must have prompted this movement to those whom even then 
He was calling to His presence), that two results followed. 
As regarded the enemy, this 23d Dragoons, not, I believe, 
originally three hundred and fifty strong, paralysed a French 
column, six thousand strong, then ascended the hill, and fixed 
the gaze of the whole French army. As regarded themselves, 
the 23d were supposed at first to have been barely not anni- 
hilated ; but eventually, I believe, about one in four survived. 
And this, then, was the regiment — a regiment already for 
some hours glorified and hallowed to the ear of all London, as 
lying stretched, by a large majority, upon one bloody aceldama 
— in which the young trooper served whose mother was now 
talking in a spirit of such joyous enthusiasm. Did I tell her 
the truth 1 Had I the heart to break up her dreams ? No. 
To-morrow, said I to myself — to-morrow, or the next day, 
will publish the worst. For one night more, wherefore should 
she not sleep in peace 1 After to-morrow, the chances are too 
many that peace will forsake her pillow. This brief respite, 
then, let her owe to oni/ gift and mj/ forbearance. But, if I 
told her not of the bloody price that had been paid, not, 
therefore, was I silent on the contributions from her son's 
regiment to that day's service and glory. I showed her not 
the funeral banners under which the noble regiment was 
sleeping. I lifted not the overshadowing laurels from the 



li* I 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 69 

bloody trench in which horse and rider lay mangled together. 
But I told her how these dear children of England, officers 
and privates, had leaped their horses over all obstacles as 
gaily as hunters to the morning's chase. I told her how they 
rode their horses into the mists of death (saying to myself, 
but not saying to her), and laid down their young lives for 
thee, mother England ! as willingly — poured out their 
noble blood as cheerfully — as ever, after a long day's sport, 
when infants, they had rested their wearied heads upon their 
mother's knees, or had sunk to sleep in her arms. Strange it is, 
yet true, that she seemed to have no fears for her son's safety, 
even after this knowledge that the 23d Dragoons had been 
memorably engaged ; but so much was she enraptured by the 
knowledge that his regiment, and therefore that he^ had 
rendered conspicuous service in the dreadful conflict — a ser- 
vice w^hich had actually made them, within the last twelve 
hours, the foremost topic of conversation in London — so ab- 
solutely was fear swallowed up in joy — that, in the mere 
simplicity of her fervent nature, the poor woman threw her 
arms round my neck, as she thought of her son, and gave to 
me the kiss which secretly was meant for him. 

Section the Second. — The Vision of Sudden Death. 

XXV. What is to be taken as the predominant opinion of 
man, reflective and philosophic, upon sudden death *? It is 
remarkable that, in different conditions of society, sudden 
death has been variously regarded as the consummation of an 
earthly career most fervently to be desired, or, again, as that 
consummation w^hich is with most horror to be deprecated. 
Cogsar the Dictator, at his last dinner party {coena), on the 
very evening before his assassination, when the minutes of his 
earthly career were numbered, being asked what death in his 
judgment, might be pronounced the most eligible, replied, 
"That which should be most sudden." On the other hand, 
the divine Litany of our English Church, when breathing 
forth supplications, as if in some representative character, for 



70 DE QUINCEY 

the whole human race prostrate before God, places such a 
death in the very van of horrors : — " From lightning and 
tempest ; from plague, pestilence, and famine ; from battle 
and murder, and from sudden death — Good Lord^ deUcer 
us." Sudden death is here made to crown the climax in a 
grand ascent of calamities ; it is ranked among the last of 
curses ; and yet, by the noblest of Romans, it was ranked as 
the first of blessings. In that difference, most readers will 
see little more than the essential difference between Christian- 
ity and Paganism. But this, on consideration, I doubt. The 
Christian Church may be right in its estimate of sudden 
death ; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may 
also be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from life 
— as that which seems most reconcilable with meditation, with 
penitential retrospects, and with the humilities of farewell 
prayer. There does not, however, occur to me any direct 
scriptural warrant for this earnest petition of the Enghsh 
Litany, unless under a special construction of the word " sud- 
den." It seems a petition — indulged rather and conceded to 
human infirmity, than exacted from human piety. It is not 
so much a doctrine built upon the eternities of the Christian 
system, as a plausible opinion built upon special varieties of 
physical temperament. Let that, however, be as it may, 
two remarks suggest themselves as prudent restraints upon a 
doctrine, which else mai/ wander, and has wandered, into an 
uncharitable superstition. The first is this : that many people 
are likely to exaggerate the horror of a sudden death, from the 
disposition to lay a false stress upon words or acts, simply be- 
cause by an accident they have become final words or acts. 
If a man dies, for instance, by some sudden death when he 
happens to be intoxicated, such a death is falsely regarded 
with peculiar horror; as though the intoxication were sud- 
denly exalted into a blasphemy. But that is unphilosophic. 
The man was, or he was not, habitually a drunkard. If not, 
if his intoxication were a solitary accident, there can be no 
reason for allowing special emphasis to this act, simply be- 
cause through misfortune it became his final act. Nor, on 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 71 

the other hand, if it were no accident, but one of his habitual 
transgressions, will it be the more habitual or the more a 
transgression, because some sudden calamity, surprising him, 
has caused this habitual transgression to be also a final one. 
Could the man have had any reason even dimly to foresee his 
own sudden death, there would have been a new feature in his 
act of intemperance — a feature of presumption and irrever- 
ence, as in one that, having known himself drawing near to 
the presence of God, should have suited his demeanour to an 
expectation so awful. But this is no part of the case sup- 
posed. And the only new element in the man's act is not 
any element of special immorality, but simply of special 
misfortune. 

XXVI. The other remark has reference to the meaning of 
the word sudden. Very possibly Caisar and the Christian 
Church do not differ in the way supposed ; that is, do not dif- 
fer by any difference of doctrine as between Pagan and Chris- 
tian views of the moral temper appropriate to death, but 
perhaps they are contemplating different cases. Both con- 
template a violent death, a fttaOavaTo^ — death that is yStato?, 
or, in other words, death that is brought about, not by in- 
ternal and spontaneous change, but by active force having 
its origin from without. In this meaning the two authorities 
agree. Thus far they are in harmony. But the difference is, 
that the Roman by the word "sudden" means unUngering ; 
whereas the Christian Litany by "sudden death" means a 
death without ivarning, consequently without any available 
summons to religious preparation. The poor mutineer, who 
kneels down to gather into his heart the bullets ft'om twelve 
firelocks of his pitying comrades, dies by a most sudden death 
in CcTesar's sense ; one shock, one mighty spasm, one (possibly 
7iot one) groan, and all is over. But, in the sense of the Lit- 
any, the mutineer's death is far from sudden ; his offence 
originally, his imprisonment, his trial, the interval between 
his sentence and its execution, having all furnished him with 
separate warnings of his fate — having all summoned him to 
meet it with solemn preparation. 



72 DE QUINCE Y 

XXVIL Here at once, in this sharp verbal distinction, we 
comprehend the faithful earnestness with which a holy Chris- 
tian Church pleads on behalf of her poor departing children, 
that God would vouchsafe to them the last great privilege and 
distinction possible on a death-bed — viz., the opportunity of 
untroubled preparation for facing this mighty trial. Sudden 
death, as a mere variety in the modes of dying, where death 
in some shape is inevitable, proposes a question of choice 
which, equally in the Roman and the Christian sense, will be 
variously answered according to each man's variety of tem- 
perament. Meantime, one aspect of sudden death there is, 
one modification, upon which no doubt can arise, that of all 
martyrdoms it is the most agitating — viz., where it surprises 
a man under circumstances which ofter (or which seem to 
offer) some hurrying, flying, inappreciably minute chance of 
evading it. Sudden as the danger which it affronts, must be 
any effort by which such an evasion can be accomplished. 
Even that, even the sickening necessity for hurrying in ex- 
tremity where all hurry seems destined to be vain, jeven that 
anguish is liable to a hideous exasperation in one particular 
case, — viz., where the appeal is made not exclusively to the 
instinct of self-preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf 
of some other life besides your own, accidentally thrown upon 
your protection. To fail, to collapse in a service merely your 
own, might seem comparatively venial : though, in fact, it is 
far from venial. But to fail in a case where Providence has 
suddenly thrown into your hands the final interests of an- 
other — a fellow- creature shuddering between the gates of 
life and death ; this, to a man of apprehensive conscience, 
would mingle the misery of an atrocious criminality with the 
misery of a bloody calamity. You are called upon, by the 
case supposed, possibly to die ; but to die at the very moment 
when, by any even partial failure, or effeminate collapse of your 
energies, you will bo self- denounced as a murderer. You had 
but the twinkling of an eye for your effort, and that effort 
might have been unavailing ; but to have risen to the level of 
such an effort, would have rescued you, though not from 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 73 

dying, yet from dying as a traitor to your final and farewell 
duty. 

XXVI IL The situation here contemplated exposes a dread- 
ful ulcer, lurking far down in the depths of human nature. 
It is not that men generally are summoned to face such 
awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy outline, such 
a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men's natures. 
Upon the secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly 
projected, perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so 
familiar to childhood, of meeting a lion, and, through lan- 
guishing prostration in hope and the energies of hope, that 
constant sequel of lying down before the lion, publishes the 
secret frailty of human nature — reveals its deep-seated 
falsehood to itself — records its abysmal treachery. Perhaps 
not one of us escapes that dream ; perhaps, as by some 
sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for every one of 
us, through every generation, the original temptation in 
Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to 
the infirm places of his own individual will; once again a 
snare is presented for tempting him into captivity to a luxury 
of ruin ; once again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls 
by his own choice ; again, by infinite iteration, the ancient 
earth groans to Heaven, through her secret caves, over the 
weakness of her child : " Nature, from her seat, sighing 
through all her works," again " gives signs of wo that all is 
lost " ; and again the counter sigh is repeated to the sorrow- 
ing heavens for the endless rebellion against God. It is not 
without probability that in the world of dreams every one 
of us ratifies for himself the original transgression. In 
dreams, perhaps under some secret conflict of the midnight 
sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the time, but 
darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each 
several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the 
treason of the aboriginal fall. 

XXIX. The incident, so memorable in itself by its features 
of horror, and so scenical by its grouping for the eye, which 



74 DE QUINCE Y 

furnished the text for- this reverie upon Sudden Deaths oc- 
curred to myself in the dead of night, as a solitary spectator, 
when seated on the box of the Manchester and Glasgow mail, 
in the second or third summer after Waterloo. I find it 
necessary to relate the circumstances, because they are such 
as could not have occurred unless under a singular combi- 
nation of accidents. In those days, the oblique and lateral 
communications with many rural post-offices were so arranged, 
either through necessity or through defect of system, as to 
make it requisite for the main north-western mail (/. e., the 
down mail), on reaching Manchester, to halt for a number of 
hours ; how many, I do not remember ; six or seven, I think ; 
but the result was, that, in the ordinary course, the mail 
recommenced its j ourney northwards about midnight. Wearied 
with the long detention at a gloomy hotel, I walked out about 
eleven o'clock at night for the sake of fresh air ; meaning to 
fall in with the mail and resume my seat at the post-office. 
The night, however, being yet dark, as the moon had scarcely 
risen, and the streets being at that hour empty, so as to offer 
no opportunities for asking the road, I lost my way ; and did 
not reach the post-office until it was considerably past mid- 
night ; but, to my great relief (as it was important for me 
to be in Westmoreland by the morning), I saw in the huge 
saucer eyes of the mail, blazing through the gloom, an evi- 
dence that my chance was not yet lost. Past the time it 
was ; but, by some rare accident, the mail was not even yet 
ready to start. I ascended to my seat on the box, where my 
cloak was still lying as it had lain at the BridgCAvater Arms. 
I had left it there in imitation of a nautical discoverer, who 
leaves a bit of bunting on the shore of his discovery, by way 
of warning off the ground the whole human race, and notify- 
ing to the Christian and the heathen worlds, with his best 
compliments, that he has hoisted his pocket-handkerchief 
once and for ever upon that virgin soil ; thenceforward claim- 
ing the jus dominil to the top of the atmosphere above it, 
and also the right of driving shafts to the centre of the earth 
below it ; so that all people found after this warning, either 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 75 

aloft in upper chambers of the atmosphere, or groping in 
subterraneous shafts, or squatting audaciously on the sur- 
face of the soil, will be treated as trespassers — kicked, that 
is to say, or decapitated, as circumstances may suggest, by 
their very faithful servant, the owner of the said pocket- 
handkerchief. In the present case, it is probable that my 
cloak might not have been respected, and the jus gentium 
might have been cruelly violated in my person — for, in the 
dark, people commit deeds of darkness, gas being a great 
ally of morality — but it so happened that, on this night, 
there was no other outside passenger; and thus the crime, 
which else was but too probable, missed fire for want of a 
criminal. 

XXX. Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity 
of laudanum, having already travelled two hundred and fifty 
miles — viz., from a point seventy miles beyond London. In 
the taking of laudanum there was nothing extraordinary. 
But by accident it drew upon me the special attention of my 
assessor on the box, the coachman. And in that also there 
was nothing extraordinary. But by accident, and with great 
delight, it drew my own attention to the fact that this coach- 
man was a monster in point of bulk, and that he had but one 
eye. In fact, he had been foretold by Virgil as 

"Monstrum borrendum, iufornie, ingeiis cui lumen ademptum." 

He answered to the conditions in every one of the items : — 
1. a monster he was ; 2. dreadful ; 3. shapeless ; 4. huge ; 
5. who had lost an eye. But why should that delight me 1 
Had he been one of the Calenders in the "Arabian Nights," 
and had paid down his eye as the price of his criminal curi- 
osity, what right had / to exult in his misfortune ? I did not 
exult : I delighted in no man's punishment, though it were 
even merited. But these personal distinctions (Nos. 1, 2, 3, 
4, 5) identified in an instant an old friend of mine, whom I 
had known in the south for some years as the most masterly 
of mail-coachmen. He was the man in all Europe that could 
(if any couid) have driven six-in-hand full gallop over Al 



76 DE QUINCEY 

Sirat — that dreadful bridge of Mahomet, with no side battle- 
ments, and of e^'ti^a room not enough for a razor's edge — ■ 
leading right across the bottomless gulf. Under this emi- 
nent man, whom in Greek I cognominated Cyclops dlphrelates 
(Cyclops the charioteer), I, and others known to me, studied 
the diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, a word too elegant to be 
pedantic. As a pupil, though I paid extra fees, it is to be 
lamented that I did not stand high in his esteem. It showed 
his dogged honesty (though, observe, not his discernment), 
that he could not see my merits. Let us excuse his absurdity 
in this particular, by remembering his want of an eye. 
Doubtless that made him blind to my merits. In the art of 
conversation, however, he admitted that I had the whip-hand 
of him. On this present occasion, great joy was at our meet- 
ing. But what was Cyclops doing here ^ Had the medical 
men recommended northern air, or how 1 I collected, from 
such explanations as he volunteered, that he had an interest 
at stake in some suit-at-law now pending at Lancaster; so 
that probably he had got himself transferred to this station, 
for the purpose of connecting* with his professional pursuits an 
instant readiness for the calls of his lawsuit. 

XXXI. Meantime, what are we stopping fori ^Surely we 
have now waited long enough. Oh, this procrastinating mail, 
and this procrastinating post-office ! Can't they take a lesson 
upon that subject from me ? Some people have called me 
procrastinating. Yet you are witness, reader, that I was here 
kept waiting for the post-office. Will the post-office lay its 
hand on its heart, in its moments of sobriety, and assert that 
ever it waited for me 1 What are they about 1 The guard 
tells me that there is a large extra accumulation of foreign 
mails this night, owing to irregularities caused by war, by 
wind, by weather, in the packet service, which as yet does not 
benefit at all by steam. For an extra hour, it seems, the post- 
office has been engaged in threshing out the pure wheaten 
correspondence of Glasgow, and winnowing it from the chaff of 
all baser intermediate towns. But at last all is iinishedo 
Sound your horn, guard. Manchester, good-by ; we 've lost 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 11 

an hour by your criminal conduct at the post-office : which, 
however, though I do not mean to part with a serviceable 
ground of complaint, and one which really is such for the 
horses, to me secretly is an advantage, since it compels us to 
look sharply for this lost hour amongst the next eight or nine, 
and to recover it (if we can) at the rate of one mile extra per 
hour. Off we are at last, and at eleven miles an hour ; and 
for the moment I detect no changes in the energy or in the 
skill of Cyclops. 

XXXII. From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually 
(though not in law) is the capital of Westmoreland, there were 
at this time seven stages of eleven miles each. The first five 
of these, counting from Manchester, terminate in Lancaster, 
which is therefore fifty-five miles north of Manchester, and the 
same distance exactly from Liverpool. The first three stages 
terminate in Preston (called, by way of distinction from other 
towns of that name, proud Preston), at which place it is that 
the separate roads from Liverpool and from Manchester to the 
north become confluent.-^ Within these first three stages lay 
the foundation, the progress, and termination of our night's 
adventure. During the first stage, I found out that Cyclops 
was mortal : he was liable to the shocking affection of sleep — 
a thing which previously I had never suspected. If a man 
indulges in the vicious habit of sleeping, all the skill in auri- 
gation of Apollo himself, with the horses of Aurora to execute 
his notions, avails him nothing. "Oh, Cyclops ! " I exclaimed, 
"thou art mortal. My friend, thou snorest." Through the 
first eleven miles, however, this infirmity — which I grieve to 
say that he shared with the whole Pagan Pantheon — betrayed 
itself only by brief snatches. On waking up, he made an 

1 " Confluent'' : — Suppose a cnpital Y (the Pythaf^orean letter) : Lan- 
caster is at the foot of this letter ; Liverpool at the top of the right branch ; 
]\Ianchester at the top of the left; prond Preston at the centre, where the 
two branches unite. It is thirt\'-three miles along either of the two 
branches; it is twentj'-two miles along the stem — viz., from Preston in 
the middle, to Lancaster at the root. There's a lesson in geography for 
the reader. 



78 DE QUINCEY 

apology for himself, which, instead of mending matters, laid 
open a gloomy vista of coming disasters. The summer assizes, 
he reminded me, were now going on at Lancaster : in conse- 
quence of which, for three nights and three days, he had not lain 
down in a bed. During the day, he was waiting for his own 
summons as a witness on the trial in which he was interested ; 
or else, lest he should be missing at the critical moment, was 
drinking with the other witnesses, under the pastoral surveil- 
lance of the attorneys. During the night, or that part of it 
which at sea would form the middle watch, he was driving. 
This explanation certainly accounted for his drowsiness, but in 
a way which made it much more alarming ; since now, after 
several days' resistance to this infirmity, at length he was 
steadily giving way. Throughout the second stage he grew 
more and more drowsy. In the second mile of the third stage, 
he surrendered himself finally and without a struggle to his 
perilous temptation. All his past resistance had but deep- 
ened the weiglit of this final oppression. Seven atmospheres 
of sleep rested upon him ; and to consummate the case, our 
worthy guard, after singing " Love amongst the Roses " for 
perhaps thirty times, without invitation, and without applause, 
had in revenge moodily resigned himself to slumber — not so 
deep, doubtless, as the coachman's, but deep enough for mis- 
chief And thus at last, about ten miles from Preston, it 
came about that I found myself left in charge of his Majesty's 
London and Glasrgow mail, then running at the least twelve 
miles an hour. 

XXXIIL What made this negligence less criminal than else 
it must have been thought, was the condition of the roads at 
night during the assizes. At that time, all the law business 
of populous Liverpool, and also of populous Manchester, with 
its vast cincture of populous rural districts, was called up by 
ancient usage to the tribunal of Lilliputian Lancaster. To 
break up this old traditional usage required, 1. a conflict wdth 
powerful established interests ; 2. a large system of new ar- 
rangements ; and o. a new parliamentary statute. But as yet 
this change was merely in contemplation. As things were at 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 79 

present, twice in the year ^ so vast a body of business rolled 
northwards, from the southern quarter of the county, that 
for a fortnight at least it occupied the severe exertions of two 
judges in its despatch. The consequence of this was, that 
every horse available for such a service, along the whole line 
of road, was exhausted in carrying down the multitudes of 
people who were parties to the different suits. By sunset, 
therefore, it usually happened that, through utter exhaustion 
amongst men and horses, the road sank into profound silence. 
Except the exhaustion in the vast adjacent county of York 
from a contested election, no such silence succeeding to no 
such fiery uproar was ever witnessed in England. 

XXXIV. On this occas'ion the usual silence and solitude 
prevailed along the road. Not a hoof nor a wheel was to be 
heard. And to strengthen this false luxurious confidence in 
the noiseless roads, it happened also that the night was one 
of peculiar solemnity and peace. For my own part, though 
slightly alive to the possibilities of peril, I had so far yielded 
to the influence of the mighty calm as to sink into a pro- 
found reverie. The month was August, in the middle of 
which lay my own birth-day — a festival to every thoughtful 
man suggesting solemn and often sigh-born ^ thoughts. The 
county was my own native county — upon which, in its 
southern section, more than upon any equal area known to 
man past or present, had descended the original curse of 
labour in its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies only of 
men as of slaves, or criminals in mines, but working through 
the fiery will. Upon no equal space of earth was, or ever had 
been, the same energy of human power put forth daily. At 
this particular season also of the assizes that dreadful hurri- 
cane of flight and pursuit, as it might have seemed to a 

1 " TioicG in the year'' : — There were at tliat time only two assizes even 
iu the most populous counties — viz., the Lent Assizes, and the Summer 
Assizes. 

2 ^'Sigh-born" : — ^I owe the suggestion of this word to an obscure 
remembrance of a beautiful phrase iu "Giraldus Cambrensis" — viz., 
s lisp iriosce cofj itaHones. 



80 DE QUINCE Y 

stranger, which swept to and from Lancaster all day long, 
hunting the county up and down, and regularly subsiding 
back into silence about sunset, could not fail (when united 
with this permanent distinction of Lancashire as the very 
metropolis and citadel of labour) to point the thoughts pa- 
thetically upon that counter vision of rest, of saintly repose 
from strife and sorrow, towards which, as to their secret haven, 
the profounder aspirations of man's heart are in solitude con- 
tinually travelling. Obliquely upon our left we were nearing 
the sea, which also must, under the present circumstances, 
be repeating the general state of halcyon repose. The sea, 
the atmosphere, the light, bore each an orchestral part in this 
universal lull. Moonlight, and the first timid tremblings of 
the dawn, were by this time blending ; and the blendings 
were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by 
a slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered 
the woods and fields, but with a veil of equable transparency. 
Except the feet of our own horses, which, running on a sandy 
margin of the road, made but little disturbance, there was no 
sound abroad. In the clouds, and on the earth, prevailed the 
same majestic peace ; and in spite of all that the villain of a 
schoolmaster has done for the ruin of our sublimer thoughts, 
which are the thoughts of our infancy, we still believe in no 
such nonsense as a limited atmosphere. Whatever we may 
swear with our false feigning lips, in our faithful hearts we 
still believe, and must for ever believe, in fields of air travers- 
ing the total gulf between earth and the central heavens. 
Still, in the confidence of children that tread without fear 
everi/ chamber in their father's house, and to whom no door 
is closed, we, in that Sabbatic vision which sometimes is 
revealed for an hour upon nights like this, ascend with easy 
steps from the sorrow- stricken fields of earth upwards to the 
sandals of God. 

XXXV. Suddenly, from thoughts like these, I was awak- 
ened to a sullen sound, as of some motion on the distant 
road. It stole upon the air for a moment ; I listened in awe ; 
but then it died away. Once roused, however, I could not 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 81 

but observe with alarm the quickened motion of our horses. 
Ten years' experience had made my eye learned in the valu- 
ing of motion ; and I saw that we were now running thirteen 
miles an hour. I pretend to no presence of mind. On the 
contrary, my fear is, that I am miserably and shamefully 
deficient in that quality as regards action. The palsy of 
doubt and distraction hangs like some guilty weight of dark 
unfathomed remembrances upon my energies, when the signal 
is flying for action. But, on the other hand, this accursed gift 
I have, as regards thought, that in the first step towards the 
possibility of a misfortune, I see its total evolution ; in the 
radix of the series I see too certainly and too instantly its 
entire expansion ; in the first syllable of the dreadful sen- 
tence, I read already the last. It was not that I feared for 
ourselves. Us, our bulk and impetus charmed against peril 
in any colUsion. And I had ridden through too many hun- 
dreds of perils that were frightful to approach, that were 
matter of laughter to look back upon, the first face of which 
was horror — the parting face a jest, for any anxiety to rest 
upon o«r interests. The mail was not built, I felt assured, 
nor bespoke, that could betray me who trusted to its protec- 
tion. But any carriage that we could meet w^ould be frail 
and light in comparison of ourselves. And I remarked this 
ominous accident of our situation. We were on the wrong side 
of the road. But then, it may be said, the other party, if 
other there was, might also be on the wrong side ; and two 
wrongs might make a right. That was not likely. The same 
motive which had drawn us to the right-hand side of the road 
— viz., the luxury of the soft beaten sand as contrasted with 
the paved centre — would prove attractive to others. * The 
two adverse carriages would therefore, to a certainty, be 
travelling on the same side ; and from this side, as not being 
ours in law, the crossing over to the other would, of course, 
be looked for from us} Our lamps, still lighted, would 

1 It is true that, according to the law of the case as e.stahlished by legal 
precedents, all ^carriages were required to give way before Royal equipages, 
and therefore before the mail as one of them. But this only increased the 

6 



82 BE QUINCE Y 

give the impression of vigilance on our part. And every 
creature that met us, would rely upon tis for quartering.-^ 
All this, and if the separate links of the anticipation had been 
a thousand times more, I saw, not discursively, or by effort, 
or by succession, but by one flash of horrid simultaneous 
intuition. 

XXXVI. Under this steady though rapid anticipation of 
the evil which might be gathering ahead, ah ! what a sullen 
mystery of fear, what a sigh of wo, was that which stole upon 
the air, as again the far-off sound of a wheel was heard ! A 
whisper it ' was — a whisper from, perhaps, four miles off — 
secretly announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the 
less inevitable ; that, being known, was not, therefore, healed. 
AVhat could be done — who was it that could do it — to check 
the storm-flight of these maniacal horses 1 Could I not seize 
the reins from the grasp of the slumbering coachman ? You, 
reader, think that it would have been in i/oiir power to do so. 
And I quarrel not with your estimate of yourself. But, from 
the way in which the coachman's hand was viced between his 
upper and lower thigh, this was impossible. Easy, was it? 
See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. The cruel rider has 
kept the bit in his horse's mouth for two centuries. Unbridle 
him, for a minute, if you please, and wash his mouth with 
water. Easy, was it ? Unhorse me, then, that imperial rider ; 
knock me those marble feet from those marble stirrups of 
Charlemagne. 

XXXVII. The sounds ahead strengthened, and were now 
too clearly the sounds of wheels. Who and what could it be ? 
Was it industry in a taxed cart ? Was it youthful gaiety in 
a gig ? Was it sorrow that loitered, or joy that raced ? For 
as yet the snatches of sound were too intermitting, from dis- 
tance, to decipher the character of the motion. Whoever 
were the travellers, something must be done to warn them. 

danger, as being a regulation very imperfectly made known, very nnequally 
enforced, and therefore often embarrassing the movements on both sides. 

1 " Quartering " .- — This is tlie technical word, and, I presume, derived 
from the French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 83 

Upon the other party rests the active responsibility, but upon 
us — ■ and, wo is me ! that us was reduced to my frail opium- 
shattered self — rests the responsibility of warning. Yet, 
how should this be accomplished 1 Might I not sound the 
guard's horn ? Already, on the first thought, I was making 
my way over the roof to the guard's seat. But this, from the 
accident which I have mentioned, of the foreign mails' being 
piled upon the roof, was a difficult and even dangerous at- 
tempt to one cramped by nearly three hundred miles of out- 
side travelling. And, fortunately, before I had lost much 
time in the attempt, our frantic horses swept round an angle 
of the road, which opened upon us that final stage where the 
collision mast be accomplished, and the catastrophe sealed. 
All was apparently finished. The court was sitting ; the case 
was heard ; the judge had finished ; and only the verdict was 
yet in arrear. 

XXXVIII. Before us lay an avenue, straight as an arrow, 
six hundred yards, perhaps, in length; and the umbrageous 
trees, which rose in a regular line from either side, meeting 
high overhead, gave to it the character of a cathedral aisle. 
These trees lent a deeper solemnity to the early light ; but 
there was still light enough to perceive, at the further end 
of this Gothic aisle, a frail reedy gig, in which were seated 
a young man, and by his side a young lady. Ah, young 
sir ! what are you about 1 If it is requisite that you should 
whisper your communications to this young lady — though 
really I see nobody, at an hour and on a road so solitary, 
likely to overhear you — is it therefore requisite that you 
should carry your lips forward to hers 1 The little carriage 
is creeping on at one mile an hour ; and the parties within 
it being thus tenderly engaged, are naturally bending down 
their heads. Between them and eternity, to all human calcu- 
lation, there is but a minute and a-half Oh heavens ! what 
is it that I shall do 1 Speaking or acting, what help can I 
offer? Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale 
might seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from 
the " Iliad " to prompt the sole resource that remained. Yet 



84 DE QUINCE Y 

so it was. Suddenly I remembered the shout of Achilles, 
and its effect. But could I pretend to shout like the son 
of Peleus, aided by Pallas 1 No : but then I needed not the 
shout that should alarm all Asia militant ; such a shout would 
suffice as might ca^rry terror into the hearts of two thoughtless 
young people, and one gig-horse. I shouted — and the young 
man heard me not. A second time I shouted — and now 
he heard me, for now he raised his head. 

XXXIX. Here, then, all had been done that, by me, could 
be done : more on mi/ part was not possible. Mine had been 
the first step ; the second was for the young man ; the third 
was for God. If, said I, this stranger is a brave man, and if, 
indeed, he loves the young girl at his side — or, loving her 
not, if he feels the obligation, pressing upon every man worthy 
to be called a man, of doing his utmost for a woman confided 
to his protection — he will, at least, make some effort to save 
her. If that fails, he will not perish the more, or by a death 
more cruel, for having made it ; and he will die as a brave 
man should, with his face to the danger, and with his arm 
about the woman that he sought in vain to save. But, if he 
makes no effort, shrinking, without a struggle, from his duty, 
he himself will not the less certainly perish for this baseness of 
poltroonery. He will die no less : and why not 1 Wherefore 
should we grieve that there is one craven less in the world ? 
No ; let him perish, without a pitying thought of ours wasted 
upon him ; and, in that case, all our grief will be reserved for 
the fate of the helpless girl who now, upon the least shadow 
of failure in Mm, must, by the fiercest of translations — must, 
without time for a prayer — must, within seventy seconds, 
stand before the judgment-seat of God. 

XL. But craven he was not : sudden had been the call 
upon him, and sudden was his answer to the call. He saw, 
he heard, he comprehended, the ruin that was coming down : 
already its gloomy shadow darkened above him ; and already 
he was measuring his strength to deal with it. Ah ! what a 
vulgar thing does courage seem, when we see nations buying 
it and selling it for a shilling a-day : ah ! what a sublime thing 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 85 

does courage seem, when some fearful summons on the great 
deeps of life carries a man, as if running before a hurricane, up 
to the giddy crest of some tumultuous crisis, from which lie two 
courses, and a voice says to him audibly," One way lies hope ; 
take the other, and mourn for ever ! " How grand a triumph, 
if, even then, amidst the raving of all around him, and the 
frenzy of the danger, the man is able to confront his situa- 
tion — is able to retire for a moment into solitude with God, 
and to seek his counsel from Him ! 

XLL For seven seconds, it might be, of his seventy, the 
stranger settled his countenance steadfastly upon us, as if to 
search and value every clement in the conflict before him. 
For five seconds more of his seventy he sat immovably, like 
one that mused on some great purpose. For five more, per- 
haps, he sat with eyes upraised, like one that prayed in 
sorrow, under some extremity of doubt, for light that should 
guide him to the better choice. Then suddenly he rose ; stood 
upright ; and, by a powerful strain upon the reins, raising his 
horse's fore-feet from the ground, he slewed him round on the 
pivot of his hind-legs, so as to plant the little equipage in a 
position nearly at right angles to ours. Thus far his condi- 
tion was not improved ; except as a first step had been taken 
towards the possibility of a second. If no more were done, 
nothing was done ; for the little carriage still occupied the 
very centre of our path, though in an altered direction. Yet 
even now it may not be too late : fifteen of the seventy seconds 
may still be unexhausted ; and one almighty bound may avail 
to clear the ground. Hurry, then, hurry ! for the flying mo- 
ments — they hurry ! Oh, hurry, hurry, my brave young man ! 
for the cruel hoofs of our horses — they also hurry ! Fast are 
the flying moments, faster are the hoofs of our horses. But 
fear not for him, if human energy can suflice ; faithful was he 
that drove to his terrific duty ; faithful was the horse to his 
command. One blow, one impulse given with voice and hand, 
by the stranger, one rush from the horse, one bound as if in 
the act of rising to a fence, landed the docile creature's fore- 
feet upon the crown or arching centre of the road. The larger 



86 ' DE QUINCE Y 

half of the little equipage had then cleared our over-towering 
shadow : that was evident even to my own agitated sight. 
But it mattered little that one wreck should float off in safety, 
if upon the wreck that perished were embarked the human 
freightage. The rear part of the carriage — was that certainly 
beyond the line of absolute ruin 1 What power could answer 
the question ? Glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel, 
which of these had speed enough to sweep between the ques- 
tion and the answer, and divide the one from the other 1 
Light does not tread upon the steps of light more indi visibly, 
than did our all-conquering arrival upon the escaping efforts 
of the gig. That must the young man have felt too plainly. 
His back was now turned to us ; not by sight could he any 
longer communicate with the peril ; but by the dreadful 
rattle of our harness, too truly had his ear been instructed 
— that all was finished as regarded any effort of Ms. Already 
in resignation he had rested from his struggle ; and perhaps 
in his heart he was whispering, " Father, which art in heaven, do 
Thou finish above what I on earth have attempted." Faster 
than ever mill-race we ran past them in our inexorable flight. 
Oh, raving of hurricanes tha,t must have sounded in their 
young ears at the moment of our transit ! Even in that 
moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud. Either with 
the swingle-bar, or with the haunch of our near leader, we 
had struck the off-wheel of the little gig, which stood rather 
obliquely, and not quite so far advanced, as to be accurately 
parallel with the near-wheel The blow, from the fury of our 
passage, resounded terrifically. I rose in horror, to gaze upon 
the ruins we might have caused. From my elevated station I 
looked down, and looked back upon the scene, which in a mo- 
ment told its own tale, and wrote all its records on my heart 
for ever. 

XLII. Here was the map of the passion that now had 
finished. The horse was planted immovably, with his fore- 
feet upon the paved crest of the central road. He of the 
whole party might be supposed untouched by the passion of 
death. The little cany carriage — partly, perhaps, from the 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 87 

violent torsion of the wheels in its recent movement, partly 
from the thundering blow we had given to it — as if it sym- 
pathised with human horror, was all alive with tremblings 
and shiverings. The young man trembled not, nor shivered. 
He sat like a rock. But his was the steadiness of agitation 
frozen into rest by horror. As yet he dared not to look 
round ; for he knew that, if anything remained to do, by him 
it could no longer be done. And as yet he knew not for cer- 
tain if their safety were accomplished. But the lady 

XLIII. But the lady ! Oh, heavens ! will that spec- 
tacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon 
her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, 
clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying, 
raving, despairing ? Figure to yourself, reader, the elements 
of the case ; suffer me to recall before your mind the circum- 
stances of that unparalleled situation. From the silence and 
deep peace of this saintly summer night — from the pathetic 
blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight — 
from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, mur- 
muring love — suddenly as from the woods and fields — sud- 
denly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelation 
— suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped 
upon her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crowned 
phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger 
roar of his voice. 

XLIV. The moments were numbered ; the strife was fin- 
ished ; the vision was closed. In the twinkling of an eye, 
our flying horses had carried us to the termination of the um- 
brageous aisle; at right angles we wheeled into our former 
direction ; the turn of the road carried the scene out of my 
eyes in an instant, and cvrapt it into my dreams for ever. 



88 DE QUINCE Y 

Sectioit the Third. — Dream-Fugue. 

FOUNDED ON THE PRECEDING THEME OP SUDDEN DEATH. 

" Whence the sound 
Of instruments, that made mehjdious chime, 
Was heard, of harp and organ ; and who moved 
Their stops and chords, was seen ; his volant touch 
Instinct through all proportions, low and high. 
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant I'ugue. 

Pa)\Lost, B. XI. 

Tumultuosissimamente. 

XLV. Passion of sudden death ! that once in youth I read 
and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted signs ! ^ — 
rapture of panic taking the shape (which amongst tombs in 
churches I have seen) of woman bursting her sepulchral bonds 

— of woman's Ionic form bending forward from the ruins of 
her grave with arching foot, with eyes upraised, with clasped 
adoring hands — waiting, watching, trembling, praying for the 
trumpet's call to rise from dust for ever ! Ah, vision too fear- 
ful of shuddering humanity on the brink of almighty abysses ! 

— vision that didst start back, that didst reel away, like a 
shrivelling scroll from before the wrath of fire racing on the 
wings of the wind ! Epilepsy so brief of horror, wherefore is 
it that thou canst not die ? • Passing so suddenly into dark- 
ness, wherefore is it that still thou sheddest thy sad funeral 
blights upon the gorgeous mosaics of dreams ? Fragment of 
music too passionate, heard once, and heard no more, what 
aileth thee, that thy deep rolling chords come* up at intervals 
through all the worlds of sleep, and after forty years, have 
lost no element of horror 1 

1 ^'Averted szgjis" : — I read the course and changes of the lady's 
agony in the succession of her involuntary gestures ; but it must be re- 
membered that I read all this from the rear, never once catching the lady's 
full face, and even her profde imperfectly. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 89 

I. 

XLVL Lo, it is summer — almighty summer ! The ever- 
lasting gates of life and summer are thrown open wide ; and 
on the ocean, tranquil and verdant as a savannah, the un- 
known lady from the dreadful vision and I myself are floating 
— she upon a fairy pinnace, and I upon an English three- 
decker. Both of us are wooing gales of festal happiness within 
the domain of our common country, within that ancient 
watery park, within that pathless chase of ocean, where England 
takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, 
from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness 
of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon 
the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved ! And 
upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers — yoang women 
how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing together, 
and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and incense, 
amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi from vin- 
tages, amidst natural carolling, and the echoes of sweet girlish 
laughter. Slowly the pinnace nears us, gaily she hails us, and 
silently she disappears beneath the shadow of our mighty bows. 
But then, as at some signal from heaven, the music, and the 
carols, and the sweet echoing of girlish laughter — all are 
hushed. What evil has smitten the pinnace, meeting or over- 
taking her ? Did ruin to our friends couch within our own 
dreadful shadow 1 Was our shadow the shadow of death 1 I 
looked over the bow for an answer, and, behold ! the pinnace 
was dismantled ; the revel and the revellers were found no 
more ; the glory of the vintage was dust ; and the forests with 
their beauty were left without a witness upon the seas. " But 
where," and I turned to our crew — " where are the lovely 
women that danced beneath the awning of flowers and cluster- 
ing corymbi "? Whither have fled the noble young men that 
danced with them ? " Answer there was none. But suddenly 
the man at the mast-head, whose countenance darkened with 
alarm, cried out, " Sail on the weather beam ! Down she 
comes upon us : in seventy seconds she also wall founder." 



90 DE QUINCE Y 

11. 

XLVIL I looked to the weather side, and the summer had 
departed. The sea was rocking, and shaken with gathering 
wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty mists, which grouped 
themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles. Down one 
of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel from a cross-bow, ran 
a frigate right athwart our course. " Are they mad ? " some 
voice exclaimed from our deck. " Do they woo their ruin ? " 
But in a moment, as she was close upon us, some impulse of a 
heady current or local vortex gave a wheeling bias to her 
course, and off she forged without a shock. As she ran past 
us, high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the 
pinnace. The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, 
towering surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce 
to catch her. But far away she was borne into desert spaces 
of the sea : whilst still by sight I followed her, as she ran 
before the howling gale, chased by angry sea-birds and by 
maddening billows ; still I saw her, as at the moment when 
she ran past us, standing amongst the shrouds, with her white 
draperies streaming before the wind. There she stood, with hair 
dishevelled, one hand clutched amongst the tackling ^ rising, 
.sinking, fluttering, trembling, praying — there for leagues I 
'saw her as she stood, raising at intervals one hand to heaven, 
amidst the fiery crests of the pursuing waves and the raving 
of the storm ; until at last, upon a sound from afar of mali- 
cious laughter and mockery, all was hidden for ever in driving 
showers ; and afterward, but when I know not, nor how, 

III. 

XLVIII. Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, 
wailing over the dead that die before the dawn, awakened me 
as I slept in a boat moored to some famihar shore. The 
morning twihght even then was breaking ; and, by the dusky 
revelations which it spread, I saw a girl, adorned with a gar- 
land of white roses about her head for some great festival, 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 91 

running along the solitary strand in extremity of haste. Her 
running was the running of panic ; and often she looked back 
as to some dreadful enemy in the rear. But when I leaped 
ashore, and followed on her steps to warn her of a peril in 
front, alas ! from me she fled as from another peril, and vainly 
I shouted to her of quicksands that lay ahead. Faster and 
faster she ran ; round a promontory of rocks she wheeled out 
of sight ; in an instant I also wheeled round it, but only to 
see the treacherous sands gathering above her head. Already 
her person was buried ; only the fair young head and the 
diadem of white roses around it were still visible to the pity- 
ing heavens ; and, last of all, was visible one white marble 
arm. I saw by the early twilight this fair young head, as it 
was sinking down to darkness — saw this marble arm, as it 
rose above her head and her treacherous grave, tossing, falter- 
ing, rising, clutching, as at some false deceiving hand stretched 
out from the clouds — saw this marble arm uttering her dying 
hope, and then uttering her dying despair. The head, the 
diadem, the arm — these all had -sunk ; at last over these also 
the cruel quicksand had closed ; and no memorial of the fair 
young girl remained on earth, except my own solitary tears, 
and the funeral bells from the desert seas, that, rising again 
more softly, sang a requiem over the grave of the buried child, 
and over her blighted dawn. 

XLIX. I sat, and wept in secret the tears that men have 
ever given to the memory of those that died before the dawn, 
and by treachery of earth, our mother. But suddenly the 
tears and funeral bells were hushed by a shout as of many 
nations, and by a roar as from some great king's artillery, ad- 
vancing rapidly along the valleys, and heard afar by echoes 
from the mountains. " Hush ! " I said, as I bent my ear 
earthwards to listen — " hush ! — this either is the very an- 
archy of strife, or else" — and then I listened more pro- 
foundly, and whispered as I raised my head — "or else, oh 
heavens ! it is victory that is final, victory that swallows up 
all strife." 



92 DE QUINCEY 

IV. 

L. Immediately, in trance, I was carried over land and sea 
to some distant kingdom, and placed upon a triumphal car, 
amongst companions crowned with laurel. The darkness of 
gathering midnight, brooding over all the land, hid from us 
the mighty crowds that were weaving restlessly about our- 
selves as a centre : we heard them, but saw them not. Tid- 
ings had arrived, within an hour, of a grandeur that measured 
itself against centuries ; too full of pathos they were, too full 
of joy, to utter themselves by other language than by tears, 
by restless anthems, and Te Deums reverberated from the 
choirs and orchestras of earth. These tidings we that sat 
upon the laurelled car had it for our privilege to publish 
amongst all nations. And already, by signs audible through 
the darkness, by snortings and tramplings, our angry horses, 
that knew no fear of fleshly weariness, upbraided us with de- 
lay. Wherefore was it that we delayed ? We waited for a 
secret word, that should bear witness to the hope of nations, 
as now accomplished for ever. At midnight the secret word 
arrived ; which word was — Waterloo and Recovered Christen- 
dom ! The dreadful word shone by its own light ; before us 
it went ; high above our leaders' heads it rode, and spread a 
golden light over the paths which we traversed. Every city, 
at the presence of the secret word, threw open its gates. The 
rivers were conscious as we crossed. All the forests, as we 
ran along their margins, shivered in homage to the secret 
word. And the darkness comprehended it. 

LI. Two hours after midnight we approached a mighty 
Minster. Its gates, which rose to the clouds, were closed. 
But when the dreadful word, that rode before us, reached 
them with its golden light, silently they moved back upon 
their hinges ; and at a flying gallop our equipage entered the 
grand aisle of the cathedral. Headlong was our pace ; and at 
every altar, in the little chapels and oratories to the right 
hand and left of our course, the lamps, dying or sickening, 
kindled anew in sympathy with the secret word that was fly- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 93 

ing past. Forty leagues we might have run in the cathedral, 
and as yet no strength of morning light had reached us, when 
before us we saw the aerial galleries of organ and choir. 
Every pinnacle of the fretwork, every station of advantage 
amongst the traceries, was crested by white-robed choristers, 
that sang deliverance ; that wept no more tears, as once their 
fathers had wept ; but at intervals that sang together to the 
generations, saying, 

" Chant tlie deliverer's praise in every tongue," 

and receiving answer from afar, 

" Such as once in heaven and earth were sung." 

And of their chanting was no end ; of our headlong pace was 
neither pause nor slackening. 

LII. Thus, as we ran like torrents — thus, as we swept 
with bridal rapture over the Campo Santo ^ of the cathedral 
graves — suddenly we became aware of a vast necropolis 
rising upon the far-off horizon — a city of sepulchres, built 
within the saintly cathedral for the warrior dead that rested 
from their feuds on earth. Of purple granite was the necrop- 
olis ; yet, in the first minute, it lay like a purple stain upon 
the horizon, so mighty was the distance. In the second min 
ute it trembled through many changes, growing into terraces 
and towers of wondrous altitude, so mighty was the pace. In 
the third minute already, with our dreadful gallop, we were 
entering its suburbs. Vast sarcophagi rose on every side, 
having towers and turrets that, upon the limits of the central 

1 '^ Campo Santo": — It is probable that most of my readers will be 
acquainted with the history of the Campo Santo (or cemetery) at Pisa, 
composed of earth brought from Jerusalem from a bed of sanctity, as the 
highest prize which the noble piety of crusaders could ask or imagine. To 
readers who are unacquainted with England, or who (being English) are 
yet unacquainted with the cathedral cities of England, it may be right to 
mention that the graves within-side the cathedrals often form a flat pave- 
ment over which carriages and horses might run ; and perhaps a boyish 
remembrance of one particular cathedral, across which I had seen passen- 
gers walk and- burdens carried, as about two centuries back they were 
through the middle of St. Paul's in London, may have assisted my dream. 



94 DE QUINCE Y 

aisle, strode forward with haughty intrusion, that ran back 
with mighty shadows into answering recesses. Every sar- 
cophagus showed many bas-reliefs — bas-reliefs of battles and 
of battle-fields ; battles from forgotten ages — battles from 
yesterday — battle-fields that, long since, nature had healed 
and reconciled to herself with the sweet oblivion of flowers — 
battle-fields that were yet angry and crimson with carnage. 
Where the terraces ran, there did we run ; where the towers 
curved, there did we curve. With the flight of swallows our 
horses swept round every angle. Like rivers in flood, wheel- 
ing round headlands — ■ like hurricanes that ride into the se- 
crets of forests — faster than ever light unwove the mazes of 
darkness, our flying equipage carried earthly passions, kindled 
warrior instincts, amongst the dust that lay around us — 
dust oftentimes of our noble fathers that had slept in God 
from Crdcy to Trafalgar. And now had we reached the last 
sarcophagus, now were we abreast of the last bas-relief, al- 
ready had we recovered the arrow-like flight of the illimitable 
central aisle, when coming up this aisle to meet us we be- 
held afar off a female child, that rode in a carriage as frail as 
flowers. The mists, which went before her, hid the fawns that 
drew her, but could not hide the shells and tropic flowers with 
which she played — but could not hide the lovely smiles by 
which she uttered her trust in the mighty cathedral, and in 
the cherubim that" looked down upon her from the mighty 
shafts of its pillars. Face to face she was meeting us ; face to 
face she rode, as if danger there were none. " Oh, baby ! " I 
exclaimed, " shalt thou be the ransom for W^aterloo 1 Must 
w^e, that carry tidings of great joy to every people, be messen- 
gers of ruin to thee ! " In horror I rose at the thought ; but 
then also, in horror at the thought, rose one that was sculp- 
tured on a bas-relief — a Dying Trumpeter. Solemnly from 
the field of battle he rose to his feet; and, unslinging his 
stony trumpet, carried it, in his dying anguish, to his stony 
lips — sounding once, and yet once again ; proclamation that, 
in thi/ ears, oh baby ! spoke from the battlements of death. 
Immediately deep shadows fell between us, and aboriginal 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 95 

silence. The choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our 
horses, the dreadful rattle of our harness, the groaning of our 
wheels, alarmed the graves no more. By horror the bas-relief 
had been unlocked unto life. By horror we, that were so full 
of life, we men and our horses, with their fiery fore-legs rising 
in mid air to their everlasting gallop, were frozen to a bas- 
relief Then a third time the trumpet sounded ; the seals were 
taken off all pulses ; life, and the frenzy of life, tore into their 
channels again ; again the choir burst forth in sunny gran- 
deur, as from the muffling of storms and darkness ; again the 
thunderings of our horses carried temptation into the graves. 
One cry burst from our lips, as the clouds, drawing off from 
the aisle, showed it empty before us — " Whither has the in- 
fant fled 1 — is the young child caught up to God ? " Lo ! 
afar off, in a vast recess, rose three mighty windows to the 
clouds ; and on a level with their summits, at height insuper- 
able to man, rose an altar of purest alabaster. On its eastern 
face was trembling a crimson glory. A glory was it from the 
reddening dawn that now streamed through the windows 1 
Was it from the crimson robes of the martyrs painted on the 
windows 1 Was it from the bloody bas-reliefs of earth ? 
There, suddenly, within that crimson radiance, rose the ap- 
parition of a woman's head, and then of a woman's figure. 
The child it was — grown up to woman's height. Clinging to 
the horns of the altar, voiceless she stood — sinking, rising, 
raving, despairing ; and behind the volume of incense, that, 
night and day, streamed upwards from the altar, dimly was 
seen the fiery font, and the shadow of that dreadful being 
who should have baptized her with the baptism of death. But 
by her side was kneeling her better angel, that hid his face 
with wings ; that wept and pleaded for her ; that prayed when 
she could not ; that fought with Heaven by tears for her deliv- 
erance ; which also, as he raised his immortal countenance 
from his wings, I saw, by the glory in his eye, that from 
Heaven he had won at last. 



96 DE QUINCEY 



LIII. Then was completed the passion of- the mighty fugue. 
The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet had but muttered 
at intervals — gleaming amongst clouds and surges of incense 

— threw up, as from fountains unfathomable, columns of heart- 
shattering music. Choir and anti-choir were filling fast with 
unknown voices. Thou also. Dying Trumpeter ! — with thy 
love that was victorious, and thy anguish that was finishing — 
didst enter the tumult ; trumpet and echo — farewell love, and 
farewell anguish — rang through the dreadful sanctus. Oh, 
darkness of the grave ! that from the crimson altar and from 
the fiery font wert visited and searched by the effulgence in the 
angel's eye — were these indeed thy children 1 Pomps of life, 
that, from the burials of centuries, rose again to the voice of 
perfect joy, did ye indeed mingle with the festivals of Death 1 
Lo ! as I looked back for seventy leagues through the mighty 
cathedral, I saw the quick and the dead that sang together to 
God, together that sang to the generations of man. All the 
hosts of jubilation, like armies that ride in pursuit, moved 
with one step. Us, that, with laurelled heads, were passing 
from the cathedral, they overtook, and, as with a garment, 
they wrapped us round with thunders greater than our own. 
As brothers we moved together ; to the dawn that advanced 

— to the stars that fled ; rendering thanks to God in the 
highest — that, having hid His face through one generation 
behind thick clouds of War, once again was ascending — from 
the Campo Santo of Waterloo was ascending — in the visions 
of Peace ; rendering thanks for thee, young girl ! whom, having 
overshadowed with His ineffable passion of death, suddenly 
did God relent ; suffered thy angel to turn aside His arm ; 
and even in thee, sister unknown ! shown to me for a moment 
only to be hidden for ever, found an occasion to glorify His 
goodness. A thousand times, amongst the phantoms of sleep, 
have I seen thee entering the gates of the golden dawn — 
with the secret word riding before thee — with the armies 
of the grave behind thee ; seen thee sinking, rising, raving, 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 97 

despairing ; a thousand times in the worlds of sleep have 
seen thee followed by God's angel through storms; through 
desert seas ; through the darkness of quicksands ; through 
dreams, and the dreadful revelations that are in dreams — 
only that at the last, with one sling of His victorious arm, 
He might snatch thee back from ruin, and might emblazon in 
thy deliverance the endless resurrections of His love ! 



NOTES 



JOAN OF ARC 

The essay was first published in the March and August numbers 
of TaiVs Edinburgh Magazme, 1847 (volume xiv, pages 184 and 535. 
Tlie March number contained also De Quincey's OrtJwgraphic Muti- 
neers, and the August number his Secret Societies). It was reprinted, 
with many omissions and corrections, for De Quincey's own collec- 
tive edition (Selections, Grave and Gay, frovi Writings Published and 
Unpublished), in a volume entitled Miscellanies: Chiefly Narrative 
(Edinburgh : James Hogg & Sons, 1858, page 246). 

4. scejjtre was departing from Judah. See Genesis xlix. 10. 
The Biblical language is the more appropriate since the prophecy is 
of the Messiah, who was born of the lineage of David. Notice other 
Biblical passages in this essay. 

4. apparitors. See a large dictionary. De Quincey was thinking, 
perhaps, of the Latin original. 

4. en contumace, in contumacy ; a legal phrase, intelligible from 
the context. No reason is apparent for putting it into French. 

4. as even yet may happen. Joan of Arc is now widely revered by 
the French people as an embodiment of the French national spirit. 
See pages xxxviii-xxxix. 

4. To suffer and to do. In the original magazine article the idea 
is elaborated: " To suffer and to do, that was thy porticm in this 
life ; to do — never lor thyself, always for others ; to suffer — never 
in the persons of generous champions, always in thy own: — that was 
thy destiny," etc. 

5. volleying flames. The word volley is now associated mainly 
with the discharge of a gun. Its etymology, which see, will suggest 
the earlier associations that De Quincey had in mind, 

5. The lilies of France. The fleurs-de-lis (see paije 16) of the 
French flag under the monarchy, supplanted by the tricolor of the 
republic. 



100 BE QUINCE Y 

5. wrath . . . wither them. The allusion is doubtless to the over- 
throw of the Freiich monarchy in the Revolution. 

5. What reason is there for taking up. The reason is apparent 
from the sub-title in TaiVs Magazine and in De Quincey's collec- 
tive edition, which reads In Reference to M. Michelet's History of 
France. The break at this point of the essay suggests that De 
Quincey took occasion from the appearance of Michelet's history 
to expand a sketch that he had written previously. If he could 
have held the tone of the preceding paragraphs, no one could have 
dreamed of asking a reason. Such prose is its own all-sufficient 
reason. But it was De Quincey's fatal weakness that he could 
never discern the impertinent folly of bringing his readers up with a 
violent jar, of affronting the very sensibilities that he had awakened. 
From a page of high imaginative eloquence we turn to a page of 
smug provincialism and shallow pretence of learning. 

5. mad . . . as March hares. Though Michelet has, indeed, his 
faults as an historian, De Quincey was tlie last man in the world to 
point them out. The cheap jibes of this passage could not have 
been written by any one who really knew either French history or 
the French people. The phrase " rhapsody of incoherence " sounds 
startlingly like an enemy's description of De Quincey's own style 
(see page xxvii). With a little malice and a little ingenuity, it might 
even be made to fit this very essay. And the two sentences begin- 
ning "Facts, and the consequences" expose De Quincey's blindness 
to his own most glaring faults. He, at least, was never drawn back 
" from the giddiest heights of speculation " by any regard for facts ; 
and his "natural politeness," which is well vouched for by his 
friends, never deterred him from ignoring " a large audience wait- 
ing for him on earth, and gazing upward in anxiety for his return. 
Return, therefore, he does " — rarely. 

5. recovered liberty. The Bourbon kings, restored by the allies 
after the final overthrow of Napoleon, had been once more expelled 
by the revolution of 1830. 

6. linked to the . . . shore. Apparently De Quincey is in some 
vague way applying the towing of small boats on rivers, as commonly 
on the Thames, to coastwise towing on the ocean (" stretch away out 
of sight " ). The figure is a puzzle in navigation. 

6. falconer^s lure. A decoy to recall a trained falcon or hawk. 
Investigate in a large dictionary falconer, lure, and haivking. 

6. Chevy Chase, or The Hunting of the Cheviot, perhaps the most 
famous of English ballads. See Addison's Spectator, papers 70 and 
74. The perverted quotation is from the opening : — 



NOTES 101 

The stont Erie of Northumberland 

A vow to God did make 
His pleasure in the Scottish woods 

Three sommers days to take. 

6. The angel of research stood less often by the side of De Quincey 
than the angel of meditation. See pages xxx, xxxix-xl. 

7. Fucelle d'Orleans, the Maid of Orleans. Joan is often so 
called, from her brilliant relief of that city. 

7. Dele7ida, etc. Victorious England must be destroyed "Dc- 
lenda est Karthago [Carthage] is the version of Floras (ii. 15) of the 
words used by Cato the Censor, just before the Third Punic Wai 
whenever he was called upon to record his vote in the Senate on 
any subject under discussion." —Turk. 

7. (foot-note.) The publication actually began in 1841, and had 
been completed and published (1849) before De Quincey revised this 

■ essay lor Hogg's collective editiun. 

8. hideous bigotry is the natural language of a writer who had 
bigotries on the other side. 

8. the magnanimous justice of Englishmen is not discernible, as 
Professor Hart remarks, in Shakespeare's King Henry VI, Part I. 

9. cis . . . trans, " on this side —on that," or " hither — farther " 
The prepositions were compounded in Latin with the names of 
natural boundaries ; e. g., Gallia cisalpina, Gallia transalpina, Gaul 
on this (the Italian) side of the Alps, Gaul beyond the Alps, or 
hither Gaul and farther Gaul. 

9. letter X. Compare page 77 and the foot-note. Victor Hugo's 
description of Waterloo in Les Miserahles is similarly based on a 
capital A. 

9. that odious man. Compare pages 16-17. De Quincey 's "sys- 
tematic hatred " is directed against a fabrication of his fancy. Of 
Joan's father practically nothing is known. Perhaps De Quincev's 
hatred was first aroused by Shakespeare. See King Henry VI 
Part I, v, 4. ' 

10. piety to France, in the original Latin sense of pius and pietas ; 
1- e., filial devotion, as in Virgil's j9ms Aeneas. 

11. parts in one drama. The conception is characteristic of 
De Quincey's habitual view of 'the events of history. They took 
their « stations " in his mind, not so nnich according \o their logical 
relations as to what he calls (pages 73-74) their ''scenical " grouping. 
Compare « section in a vast mysterious drama " (page 12)", and the 
Introduction, page xxx. 



102 DE QUINCE Y 

11. unweaving of doom: See some picture of the ancient Fates — 
Clothe, Lachesis, and Atropos. 

11. Anjou . . . emperor. The allusions here may be traced Ijy 
referring, in some standard manual, to the "Sicilian Vespers" 
(1282), the bloody catastrophe of the struggles between the house of 
Anjou and the Emperor Konradin. 

12. feudalism . . . Crecy. This battle (1346) is marked by his- . 
torians as the downfall of chivalry, because the French knights had 
to yield before the serried archery of the English common sol- 
diers. Warfare, from that time, depended less and less on the valour 
of individuals, and more and more on the discipline of masses of 
men. 

13. Misereres . . . Te Deums, psalms of penitence — canticles of 
praise. Like most of the psalms and canticles in the services of the 
Church, the Te Deum Laudamus (" We praise Thee as God ") is 
called by the first words of the Latin version once used universally 
throughout western Europe. Miserere (" Have mercy ") is part of 
the title of several penitential psalms (e. g., the fifty-first), and 
occurs in many canticles (e. g., in the Agnus Dei at Mass) as a 
refrain. Neither of these hymns is particularly characteristic of 
"the Eomish Church." 

13. a boundless forest. Our history on this continent has given to 
our use of the word forest suggestions of wildness and density that 
did not attach to it in England. The famous New Forest is any- 
thing but a wilderness ; and Shakespeare's Forest of Arden was 
conceived by him quite differently from Longfellow's " forest pri- 
meval " in Evangeline. Investigate the word in a large dictionary. 

13. " Abbeys there were.'" Professor Turk locates the reference in 
Wordsworth's Peter Bell, Part ii. De Quincey quotes inexactly from 
memory. 

14. mysterious fawns. The adventures of knights-errant narrated 
in the medigeval romances not infrequently arise from the pursuit 
of some mysteriously elusive beast, who leads them on and on into 
the forest. The romantic situation is very like that of Fitz-James 
in Scott's Lady of the Lake. 

14. marches . . . marquis. AVhat is the connection between 
these words '? Investigate their etymology. 

14. Sir Roger de Coverley ; a quotation from memory, the answer 
having been made to Sir Roger. (See the end of Spectator No. 122.) 
Professor Turk suggests that De Quincey may have been thinking of 
Spectator No. 117 (on witchcraft). 



NOTES 103 

15. not a shepherdess. The point is not settled by the mere word 
hergereta. The rest of the paragraph is fanciful a priori (see page 33, 
and note) argument. Michelet "rests upon" the evidence as a 
whole (see T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne cVArc, pages 9-10, 19-20). 

15. Bergereta, shepherdess, a mediaeval Latin form for the French 
hergerette. 

16. praedial servant, a servant attached to the land. No excuse is 
apparent for this piece of pedantry. 

16. Chevalier of St. Louis, a member, by royal award for military 
service, of a French honorary order. Professor Turk observes that 
Chevalier was the lowest rank in this order, and that it is not properly 
a form of address. The passages below mean : " My daughter, have 
you fed the pig ? " " Maid of Orleans, have you saved the royal 
standard?" 

17. detection of the dauphin. Again De Quincey's objection is 
purely a priori. The famous incident is no more wonderful than 
others equally vouched for in the Maid's wonderful career. 

17. coup d'essai, literally stroke of trial ; i. e., public test, as De 
Quincey might apparently as well have said. Compare coup de main, 
page 21. 

17. pricks for sheriffs. See Century Dictionary, under prick (verb) 
10 (b), and Pricking for sheriffs nnder pricking (noun). 

18. un pen fort, a little strong, a bit too much. 

19. The English hoij, Henry VI, the English candidate for the 
throne of France. His mother was the eldest daughter of Charles 
VI of France (see page 11), who declared Henry V of England his 
heir. Henry V having meantime died, the throne was disputed by 
the " English boy," supported by the English and Burgundians, and 
the French dauphin, whom Joan had crowned in due form as 
Charles VII. 

19. ovens of Rheims. The figure is somewhat clearer in its original 
form : " The first man drawn from the oven of coronation at Rheims, 
is the man that is baked into a king. All others are counterfeits, 
made of base Indian meal — damaged by sea- water." This is the 
end of the first installment in Tait's Magazine. The figure was per- 
haps suggested by the famous bakeries of Rheims. 

19. a parte ante, literally from the part before, by anticipation; 
i. e., 3 onw anticipated, according to the language ascribed to her by 
Southey, tlie doctrine of the deist Matthew Tindal. 

19. chapels • • • oratories, a diffuse and inaccurate way of saying 
i7i church. Joan went, of course, to her parish church. Chapels she 



104 DE QUINCEY 

may well have entered in the course of her campaigns ; but what she 
may have had to do with " consecrated oratories " is not clear. 

20. '■'■Paradise Regained,'*' Book I, 196. In the original magazine 
article only the lirst line is quoted, and this inaccurately Ironi 
memory. 

20. France Delivered, in imitation of a celebrated Italian poem, 
Jerusalem Delivered, by Tasso. 

20. passion, suffering, as at page 88, and frequently in the Book 
of Common Prayer. 

20. might have been done. See the longer original sentence as 
quoted at page xxxiii. 

21. she sang mass ; i. e., she had Mass sung, with especial inten- 
tion of thanksgiving. So, below, "she crowned him." Literally, of 
course no one is said to sing Mass but the priest at the altar, the 
" celebrant." Tlie meaning is clear enough ; but De Quincey is less 
precise in matters of religion than in many others. See note below 
on divine Litany (69) and above on oratories (19). 

21. cowp-de-main, bold and sudden assault; literally, an assault 
without artillery. 

21. excepting one man. It is not clear whom De Quincey had in 
mind. 

22. the inappreciable end; i. e., too great to be appreciated (as iu 
"inappreciable value," page 61), an obsolete sense of the word, 
which means commonly quite the reverse — too small to be 
appreciated. 

22. as M. Michelet. It was Michelet that furnished De Quincey 
with the explanation on which he insists. Michelet does, indeed, 
impute malice; but his explanation of the motive is substantially 
what is urged by De Quincey himself. 

22. Nolebat, etc. " She was unwilling to use her sword or to kill 
any one." 

23. Bishop of Beauvais. Pierre Cauchon. 

23. '•'Bishop that art.'' See Macbeth I, v, 13. 

24. triple crown. The papal tiara. 

24. horrid spectacle, from the point of view of English traditions. 
The French traditions in general give more power to the judge ; but 
it should not be assumed therefore that French criminal trials are 
usually like this of the Maid. 

25. a ivretched Dominican. Which of the two Dominicans con- 
cerned in the prosecution De Quincey means is not clear. Very 
likely, as Professor Hart suggests, his memory was at fault. 



NOTES 105 

27. four winds. Professor Turk suggests Ezehiel xxxvii. 1-10, 
especially verse 9. 

28. daughter of Ccesars. Her father was the German Emperor, 
Francis I. The German word Kaiser still echoes the mediaeval 
tradition that the " Holy Roman Empire " founded by Charlemagne 
succeeded to the fallen empire of the Roman Csesars. 

29. /ott^e, ngly. Investigate /oitZ in a large dictionary. 

29. (foot-notes.) MicheleVs fury against . . . English is in great 
part a fiction of De Quincey's own prejudice against the French. 
The four cases cited are all quite incidental, all magnified by 
De Quincey to the point of distortion, and some, at least, urged 
with provincial bad taste. Michclet's remark about the Imitatio is 
in a chapter quite separate from those on Joan. 

31. (foot-note) burgoo, "a thick oatmeal gruel or porridge used 
chiefly by seamen. The Phil. Did. [New English Dictionary] adds 
'derivation unknown.' According to London At]ien[aeum], Octo- 
ber 6, 1888, the woixl is a corruption of Arabic burghul.'" — Hart. 

32. personal rancour. Professor Hart observes justly that De 
Quincey's distinction is not warranted by history. 

33. a priori. Argument a priori is argument from general, ac- 
cepted principles, from one's stock of fixed ideas. The phrase is 
used in contradistinction to a posteriori, argument from the evidence 
in the particular case. The two terms correspond roughly to the 
more familiar deduction and induction. A priori is argument from 
reflection ; a posteriori, argument from evidence. Much of De 
Quincey's own argument is a priori. See notes above to pages 
15 and 17. 

36. English Prince, Regent, John, Duke of Bedford, 
36. imj Lord of Whichester, Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Win- 
chester, afterwards Cardinal. Both these nobles are personages in 
Shakespeare's King Henry VI. 

36. who is this ? See Isaiah Ixiii. 1. 



106 DE QUINCE Y 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for October, 1849, contained an 
essay by De Quiiicey entitled The English Mail-Coach, or The Glory of 
Motion (volume Ixvi, page 485). It ended with the incident of the 
proud mother, the end of Section I (page 69 of this edition) ; and 
there was no hint of continuation. In the December number ap- 
peared another essay, entitled The Vision of Sudden Death (volume 
Ixvi, page 741), prefaced by the following note: — 

The reader is to understand this present paper, in its two sections of 
The Fisioii, &c., and The Dream-Fugue, as connected with a previous 
paper on The English Mail-Coach, published in the Magazine for October. 
The ultimate object was the Dream -Fugue, as an attempt to wrestle with 
the utuiost efforts of music in dealing with a colossal form of impassioned 
horror. The Vision of Sudden Death contains the mail-coach incident, 
which did really occur, and did really suggest the variations of the Dream, 
here taken up by the Fugue, as well as other variations not now recorded. 
Confluent with these impressions, from the terrific experience on the Man- 
chester and Glasgow mail, were other and more general impressions, 
deriveil from long familiarity with the English mail, as developed in the 
former paper ; impressions, for instance, of animal beauty and power, of 
rai)id motion, at that time unprecedented, of connexion with the govern- 
ment and public business of a great nation, but, above all, of connexion 
with the national victories at an unexampled crisis, — the mail being the 
privileged organ for publishing and dispersing all news of that kind. 
From this function of the mail, arises naturally the introduction of 
Waterloo into the fourth variation of the Fugue ; for the mail itself hav- 
ing been carried into tlie dreams by the incident in the Vision, naturally 
all the accessory circumstances of pomj) and grandeur investing this 
national carriage followed in the train of the principal image. 

These two essays w^ere taken together and recast throughout by 
De Quincey for his own collective edition (Selections, Grave and Gay, 
from, Writings Published and Unpublished) in a volume entitled 
Miscellanies (London and Edinburgh, James Hogg & Sons ; no date; 
page 287). De Quincey's account of the composition and revision 
appeared as number 4 of the Explanatory Notices prefacing this 
volume. It is as follows : — 

" The Eiifjlish Mail-Coach" :—Thifi little paper, acconling to my origi- 
nal intention, formed part of the "Suspiria de Profundis," from which, 



NOTES 107 

for a momentary purpose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to publish it 
apart, as sufficiently intelligible even when dislocated from its place in a 
larger whole. To my surprise, however, one or two critics, not carelessly 
in converstition, but deliberately in print, professed their inability to ap- 
prehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links of the connection 
between its several i)arts. I am myself as little able to understand where 
the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, as these critics found 
themselves to unravel my logic. Possibly I may not be an indifferent and 
neutral judge in such a case. I will thei-efore sketch a brief abstract of the 
little paper according to my original design, and then leave the reader to 
judge how far this design is kept in sight through the actual execution. 

Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the dead 
of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness to an 
appalling scene, which threatened instant death in a shape the most ter- 
rific to two young people whom I had no means of assisting, except in so 
far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their danger ; 
but even that not until they stood within the very shadow of the catas- 
trophe, being divided from the most frightful of deaths by scarcely more, 
if more at all, than seventy seconds. 

Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this 
paper radiates as a natural expansion. This scene is circumstantially 
narrated in Section the Second, entitled "The Vision of Sudden Death." 

But a movement of horror, and of spontaneous recoil from this dreadful 
scene, naturally carried the wdiole of that scene, raised and idealised, into 
my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of dreams. The actual 
scene, as looked down upon from the box of the mail, was transformed 
into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as a musical fugue. This 
troubled dream is circumstantially reported in Section the Third, entitled 
"Dream-Fugue upon the theme of Sudden Death." What I had beheld 
from my seat upon the mail ; the scenical strife of action and passion, 
of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving in ghostly 
silence ; this duel between life and death, narrowing itself to a point of 
such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared ; all these elements 
of the scene blended, under the law of association, with the previous and 
permanent features of distinction investing the mail itself: which featui'cs 
at that time lay — 1st, in velocity unprecedented ; 2dly, in the power and 
beauty of the horses ; 3dly, in the official connection with the government 
of a great nation ; and 4thly, in the function, almost a consecrated function, 
of publishing and diffusing through the land the great political events, and 
especially the great battles during a conflict of unparalleled grandeur. 
These honorary distinctions are all described circumstantially in the First 
or introductory Section ("The Glory of Motion"). The three first were 
distinctions maintained at all times ; but the fourth and grandest be- 
longed exclusively to the war with Napoleon ; and this it was which most 
naturally introduced Waterloo into the dream. Waterloo, I understood, 
was the particular feature of the "Dream-Fugue " which my censors were 



108 DE QUINCE Y 

least able to account for. Yet surely Waterloo, which, in common with 
every other great battle, it had been our special privilege to publish ovei* 
all the land, most naturally entered the dream under the license of our 
privilege. If not — if there be anything amiss — let the Dream be respon- 
sil)]e. The Dream is a law to itself : and as well quarrel with a rainbow 
for showing, or for not showing, a secondary arch. So far as 1 know, 
every element in the shifting movements of the Dream derived itself 
either primarily from the incidents of the actual scene, or from secondary 
features associated with the mail. For example, the cathedral aisle de- 
rived itself from the mimic combination of features which grouped them- 
selves together at the point of approaching collision — viz., an arrow-like 
section of the road, six hundred yards long, under the solemn lights de- 
scribed, with lofty trees meeting overhead in arches. The guard's horn, 
again — a humble instrument in itself — was yet glorified as the organ of 
publication for so many great national events. And the incident of the 
Dying Trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas-relief, and carries a mnrble 
trumjtet to his marble lips for the purpose of warning the female infant, 
was doubtless secretly suggested by my own imperfect etfort to seize the 
guard's horn, and to blow a warning blast. But the Dream knows best; 
and the Dream, I say again, is the res[)onsible party. 

In an article for the Saturday Review of Feb. 23, 1895 (volume 79, 
page 246), entitled How De Quincey JVorked, Professor Dowden ex- 
amines the revision in detail : — 

"An interleaved copy, crowded with De Qnincey's corrections . . . was 
set up by the printers for Hogg ; but the author was not yet satisfied ; he 
went again to work ; dealt with the pioof-sheets as if they wei'e a first 
copy ; omitted, added, and emended ; again inteileaved some pages with 
blank paper, which again are crowded with alterations in his tlainty and 
scholarly handwriting. And some of the most striking effects of his lofty 
and elaborate rhetoric v;ere reached only in the final revision." 

41. married the daughter of a duke. Apparently this feat was ac- 
complished by another Palmer; but the matter is of no consequence. 

41. (foot-note.) The play upon the word invention arises from 
its being used by the ecclesiastical calendar in a technical sense of 
discovery or recovery. Inventio sanctae crucis means the recoA'ery of 
the holy cross. 

41. anarchies. Investigate the etymology. Is the word usual in 
the plural ? Exactly what does it mean here ? 

42. aiJocalyiMc vials. Apocalypse is the Greek derivative some- 
times used as the title of the last book of the Bible, which is more 
familiarly called by the corresponding Latin derivative word Eevela- 
tion. See chapters xv and xvi. 



NOTES lOS 

42. Te D:mn. See note to page 13. 

42. TJie Victories of England. De Quiiicey's point of view is too 
iiiti'iisel}^ British for any such impartiality as might be expected from 
an historian. He loses few opportunities for a liing at the French, 
whom he seems to detest more cordially than intelligently.^ Compare 
])ages 5-6, 51 and 61 (with the foot-notes). A French point of 
view^ may be had from the Waterloo chapter in Victor Hugo's Lcs 
Miserables, or from Erckmann-Chatrian's stoiy, TFaterloo. 

43. most universities . . . one single college. De Qnincey's te-rms 
apply only to Great Britain and the United States, and even there 
rather loosely. Investigate university and college in a large dictionary. 

43. Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act. " These might be called 
respectively the autumn, winter, spring, and summer terms. 
Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, is on September 
29. Hilary and Trinity are other names for Lent term and Act 
term respectively. Act term is the last term of the academic year; 
its name is that originally given to a disputation for a Master's 
degree ; such disputations took place at the end of the year gen- 
erally, and hence gave a name to the summer term. Although the 
rules concerning residence at Oxford are more stringent than in De 
Quincey's time, only eighteen weeks' residence is required during 
the year, six in Michaelmas, six in Lent, and six in Easter and 
Act.'" — Turk. 

44. The humour of this paragraph is characteristic of De Quincey in 
being somewhat recondite. Consult a large dictionary for the words 
quaternion, attaint (compare attainted, page 50), pariah, and assizes. 

44. privileged salle-d-manger. The dining-rooms of many English 
inns are still designated by classes as " cotfee " and " commercial." 

44. (foot-note.) De non apparentibus. The "fiction" is that 
the law regards things not appearing (i. e., not in evidence) as not 
existing. 

45. (foot-note.) snohs . . . nobs. See the Century Dictionary. 

45. Penumbra is a term of astronomy. Construction and construc- 
tively^ like attaint on the previous page, are terms of law. Quaternion 
(43) is used primarily in mathematics; and from mathematics comes 
the clause (81) about "the radix of the series." Jury-reins (47) is 
drawn irom navigation. Systole and diastole (50) are technical terms 
of phj'-siology. A fortiori (51) is a term of logic. Limited atmosphere 
(80) is a reference to physics. Note other terms derived from special 
sciences, with a view to estimating the range and character of De 
Quincey's vocabulary. 



110 DE QUINCE Y 

45. the analogy of theatres. An argument by analogy (a pari) is 
an argument from a parallel case, usually an argument from history. 
It amounts to saying, Since this was true in such-and-such a former 
case, it will probably be true in this case also. The force of the 
argument depends on the closeness of the parallel; and, conversely, 
its weakness, as in the analogy refuted here, is that an opponent can 
often urge an important point of difference. This method of argu- 
ment is very popular, and very often abused by the citation of cases 
that are made to appear parallel, though in fact they are not. De 
Qaincey was very fond of it. Observe that the argument here, like 
many of De Quincey's others, is largely imaginary. The playful 
insistence on " drawing room " instead of " garret " is also, in ettect, 
argument by analogy ; and so is the Welshman's citation of the prov- 1 
erb at page 53. Compare the note on a fortiori, page 51. 

45. metaphysical, used humorously here; in what sense? It was 
De Quincey's own inveterate habit to argue metaphysically. 

45. attics . . . garrets. The singidar would be more usual. The 
New English Dictionary cites similar cases of garrets, but not of 
attics. Professor Hart says that both are occasionally heard in this 
country. 

46. ottoman. See the Century Dictionary. 

46. jump. A use of the word more common in the seventeenth 
century than in De Quincey's time. See a large dictionary. 

This paragraph, but for the pedantic " constructively present by 
representation," is in De Quincey's best vein of humour. Less 
elaborate than his usual witticisms, it la the more direct and 
natural. 

46. hammer-cloth, " a cloth covering the driver's seat or 'box ' in 
a state or family coach." The derivation is unknown. De Quincey's 
conjecture that it is a corruption of hamper-cloth is not corroborated. 
{New English Dictionary.) 

47. jury-reins, after the analogy of jury-mast, " a temporary mast 
put up in place of one that has been bnjken or carried away." {Neio 
English Dictionary.) " According to Skeat's letter of March 8, 1884 
(in London Academy), jury is for ajury, from Anglo-French ajuere — 
Latin adjuvare, ' to aid.' A jury-mast is thus an aid-mast, an adjutory 
mast." — Hart. 

47. ga ira, literally "that will go"; the refrain of a popular 
street song of the French Revolution. 

47. loarming-pans are more antiquated than stage-coaches. In the 
days before stoves they were filled with hot embers from the hearth, 



NOTES 111 

to warm the otherwise icy sheets of our ancestors. To-day they are 
occasionally seen, like spinning-wlieels, as parlour ornaments. 

47. hustings " (O. E, husting, 0. N. hus-thing, household assem- 
bly). . . . The temporary platform from which, previous to 1872, 
the nomination of candidates for Parliament was made, and on 
which these stood while addressing the electors. Hence, context- 
ually, the proceedings at a parliamentary election." (^New English 
Dictionary.) 

48. The paragraph on the safety of the mail-coach is a typical 
instance of De Quince3'^'s fanciful playing with an idea. It is 
couched, partly in terms of astrology (" allocating to <a particular 
moon," "house of life"), partly in terms of law ("posse," "legal 
domicile," "felony," "nuisances," "arson"), the idea of safety as a 
ijiatter of one's lucky star being whimsically involved with the idea 
of safety before the law. 

48. noters and 'protesters, from note and protest in the commercial 
sense, which see in a large dictionary. Of course in the following 
clause De Quincey puns. Professor Hart urges that "^ince noters 
and protesters are coupled together as persons who make the debtor's 
life miserable, the word cannot mean the maker of a promissory note. 
Can it be for noterer, an archaic form of notari/ V The suggestion, 
hardly seems plausible. If De Quincey is taking the point of view 
of a debtor, protester is equally out of line. If he wishes to imply 
the point of view of a creditor, both noter and protester are clear 
enough ; but both seem out of line with the context. In short, the 
passage is perplexing. 

48. house of life. A term of astrology. See a large dictionary. 

49. parliamentary rat. ^'■Rat " seems to have been a slang term for 
a man that went over to the other party. See Century Dictionary , 
rat (n), 5. 

49. laesaraajedas, offence against the person of the emperor. The 
phrase is sometimes used to-day, with satirical implication, in its 
French, form lese-majeste. 

49. Aeneid, Book II, line 311 (in the description of the burning 
of Troy) : " Now falls the house of Deiphobus in wide ruin, under 
the conquering fire ; now hums Ucalegon's next.''"' 

50. quarterings. See De Quincey's note to page 82. 

50. benefit of clergy, the ancient right of the clergy to be tried in 
ecclesiastical courts, and hence to be exempt from the jurisdiction of 
the civil courts. In the middle ages this " benefit" was practically 
granted to almost any one who could read, perhaps on the presump- 



112 DE QUINCEY 

tion that lie must be at least intending to take Hol}^ Orders. See, in 
a large dictionary, the successive uses of the word clerk. 

50-51, Quarter Sessions^ the quarterly sittings of English local 
courts. The sittings of a court were also called, from the same deri- 
vation, assizes, as on pages 78 and 79. 

51. a 'potential station seems to mean a station, or position, of 
power. The sense is unusual, perhaps unwarrantable. In any case, 
it is an instance of De Quincey's fondness for the recondite. The 
usual sense of the word appears iw jjotentially at page 73. For the 
use of the word station compare station of good loill^ page 3. 

51. a fortiori (^causa), literally "for a stronger (reason)," or 
practically *'much more'*; a term of logic used to describe a 
particular form of the argument by analogy (a pari). It may be 
called the much-more argument. " If Grod so clothed the grass of 
the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall 
he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith ? " St. MattheWj 
vi. 30. See note to page 45 on analogy. 

52. false., fleeting, perjured., a quotation from Richard III, I, iv, 55. 
52. Brummagem, a popular perversion of the word Birmingham. 

The city having become famous for the manufacture of cheap 
jewelry, Brummagem came to be synonymous with tawdriness. See 
the next page. 

52. Jacobinical. The name Jacobins, originally applied to a radi- 
cal club in Paris during the French Revolution, was later applied to 
the whole radical party, and then generally to all who held extreme 
revolutionary doctrines. 

52. a tower of strength. See Richard III., V, iii, 12. 

53- OmrahSy etc. Professor Turk points out the reminiscence of 
AVordsworth's Prelude., Book X, lines 18-20. Much of the paragraph 
is in playful imitation of the oriental style. The illustration may 
have been suggested by Macbeth, II, iv, 10-13. 

53-54. Roman pearls. See Century Dictionary under pearl. 

54. 6th of Edward Longshanks ; i. e., a law of the sixth year of 
Edward I ; but of course the law is invented by De Quincey as a 
jest. 

54. modern . . . travelling cannot compare. De Quincey was a con- 
servative. Moreover in 1849, when this essay was written, railways 
were by no means the matter of course that they are to-day. Now- 
adays the associations of most people with " the Glory of Motion " 
are habitually with railways ; and much that De Quincej'' felt from 
the stage-coach he might well have felt, had he lived fort}"^ years later, 



NOTES 113 

from the railway. Railway travelling in his time had comparatively 
few possibilities of exhilaration. Even to-day this particular pleas- 
ure of travelling has been revealed largely through the applications 
of electricity. Later generations may find our enthusiasms as old- 
fashioned as we find De Quincey's. Because we enjoy a steam-boat 
it does not follow that there will be no more sail-boats ; but the 
stage-coach, in our day, has become a pastime of the rich few. And 
even they now prefer the automobile. Though the speed of this last 
is " the product of blind, insensate agencies," at least it can be heard, 
seen, and felt to a degree inconceivable by the protesting essayist 
of 1849. c, J 

Five years later (1854) Thoreau, who certainly was not dazzled by 
« modern improvements " and who has some philosophic satire on 
railroads, yet felt a kind of poetry in modern transportation. See 
Walden, Chapter IV. Robert Louis Stevenson, who was much more 
a traveller than De Quincey, and no less an artist, found literary 
material in railroads. Mr. Kipling, who frankly admires modern 
machinery, and uses it too much, perhaps, in his stories, puts into 
the mouth of a Scotch engineer a hot rebuke of the attitude exem- 
plified by De Quincey {McAndrew's Hymn, in The Seven Seas). 

54. non magna loquimur . . . vivimus, " not ' we say great things,' 
but ' we live ' them." Compare the word grandiloquence. 

55. Tidings fitted to convulse all nations. The essential change in 
the conditions of announcing news is not from horses to steam ; it is 
the telegraph. Such " gatherings of gazers " as De Quincey speaks of 
have now for their "centre" the bulletin-board of a telegraph ofiice. 

55. lawny thickets of Marlborough forest. See note to page 13, 
boundless forest. 

56. aristocratic distinctions in my favour. De Quincey was the son 
of a Manchester merchant. 

57. ''Say, all our praises.'' The quotation which De Quincey per- 
verts is from Pope's iWoraZ Essays, Epistle III (Of the Use of Riches), 
line 249. 

58. (foot-note.) Apparently De Quincey has in mind the follow- 
ing description of King Lycurgus in the Knight's Tale : 

Aboute his chaar ther weuten white Alauntz 

Twenty and rao, as grete as any steer, 

To hunten at the leon or the deer ; 

And folowed hym with mosel fast ybounde, 

Colered of gold, and tourettes fyled rounde. 

Canterbury Tales, A, 2152. 
8 



114 DE QUINCE Y 

The Alauntz were dogs, not horses ; and the tourettes apparently 
were the swivel-rings through which their leashes passed. There is 
general similarity enough to warrant De Quincey's suggestion ; and 
it is more plausible than a derivation from the other and more com- 
mon word turret. But Chaucer does not use it " in the same exact 
sense." 

59-60. This paragraph suggests the grotesque incoherence of act- 
ual dreaming. For its style see page xxxvi. The latter part is in 
the language of heraldry. 

60. (foot-note.) conciliate, apparently a typographical error for 
conciliates. 

61. down from London. In England one always speaks of going 
up to London, and down from London to the country. Similarly 
the expedition of Gyrus recounted by Xenophon is described as 
Anabasis ; i. e., a going up (dvd) to the capital of Persia. 

61. baubling. " A baubling vessel was the captain of.'* Twelfth 
Night, V, i, 57. 

62. attelage; i. e., the coach with its horses, 

62. within the privilege of the post-office. See De Quincey's note on 
page 56. 

63. (foot-note.) De Quincey's rebuke to the imaginary mirth of 
an imaginary American is hardly convincing as argument ; for, after 
all, what he is talking of is distance. Bat the foot-note, being super- 
fluous, is hardly worth debate. 

64. sun . . . just . . . setting. The long twilight is one of the charm3 
of an English sunmier. 

65. gentle or simple ; the old, traditional sense of the words. See 
a large dictionary. 

66. coachman''s person . . . intervening, the coachman sitting, of 
course, on the right of the " box " and keeping, according to English 
custom, the left side of the road. See page 81. 

66. the gazette, the official announcement. The earliest news- 
papers, being in fact merely official bulletins, were often called 
gazettes. When the scope of newspapers was expanded, the gazette 
was the name for the official part, as here. Later still, the word, 
losing its distinctive sense, was often taken as a title for the whole 
paper. The successive uses of the word may be traced in a large 
dictionary. 

67. Celtic . . . fey. The word is not Celtic. Investigate. 

68. The same kind of charge, on a larger scale, by French cavalry 
at Waterloo is made one of the most thrilling incidents of Victor 



NOTES 115 

Hugo's description in Les Miserables. The two descriptions may 
well be compared. 

68. aceldama. See a concordance to the Bible. 

69. Ccesar . . . at his last dinner paity. " Related by Suetonius in 
his life of Julius Csesar, chapter Ixxxvii : ' The day before he died, 
some discourse occurring at dinner in M. Lepidus' house upon the 
subject, which was the most agreeable way of dying, he expressed his 
preference for what is sudden and unexpected ' (repentinum inopina- 
tumque praetulerat). The story is told by Plutarch and Appian 
also." — Turk. 

69. divine Litany. De Quincey seems to use divine here in affec- 
tionate admiration rather than with his usual technical precision. 
Divine office is the technical term for the antiphonal use of the 
Psalms in the monastic " hours," Perhaps he was thinking of 
this. 

71. ^ia6avaros is a piece of pure pedantry. The word is unusual 
even in Greek, if indeed it can be proved to exist in this form ; and 
there is no excuse for a Greek word here. The Latin words used by 
Suetonius in the passage referred to (see note above to page 69) have 
no suggestion of violence. De Quincey's distinction is very plausible ; 
but it has no more warrant from the dictionaries than has his Greek 
barbarism. Professor Hart suggests that he got the word from the 
title of a treatise by John Donne (1644). Professor Turk calls atten- 
tion to Julius Ccesar, II, ii, 33. 

73. ^^ Nature, from her seat." See Paradise Lost, ix, 782. 

74. jus dominii, right of domain or ownership. 

75. jus gentium, law of nations. 

75. assessor, in the literal, etymological sense of one who sits be- 
side. Perhaps De Quincey was thinking of Milton's use in Paradise 
Lost, vi, 679, where the word means " one who shares another's 
position, rank, or dignity " {New English Dictionary) ; perhaps of the 
other use to mean an assistant to a judge. Of course the word is 
used humorously. Properly, De Quincey was assessor to the coach- 
man. 

75. Monstrum, etc., Aeneid, III, 658, translated in the next 
sentence. 

76. Cyclops. The monstrum of Virgil (see above) was one of the 
Cyclops. 

76. the art of conversation. See pages xxi-xxiii, and De Quincey's 
essay on Conversation. 

76. me procrastinating. See page xviii. 



116 DE QUINCEY 

77. aurigation, literally charioteering, a word humorously coined 
for the occasion. 

78. without invitation and without applause. The style reminds 
one of Dickens. 

80. halcyon. Find the derivation of this word, to which is 
attached a pretty Greek myth. 

81. bespoke, the common British term for clothes " made to 
order." 

81. right-hand side of the road. In England this is "the wrong 
side," British custom keeping to the left. See note above to page 66. 

81. adverse, in the Latin sense of coming to meet each other. 
The more usual sense appears in adverse armies (page 3). 

82. taxed cart, the more intelligible form. The more usual is tax- 
cart, which see. 

83. parties. Is this the vulgar use of the word ? 

84. the shout of Achilles. Iliad, xv'm, 217 . 

88. fugue. Find a full definition of this term of music. Why is 
this section called a fugue 1 

88. *' whence the sound," etc. This passage in Milton may have 
suggested also an eloquent figure in De Quincey's Conversation, in 
which the kindling of ideas between two talkers is compared to im- 
provisation on the organ. 

88. woman^s Ionic form. De Quincey may have been thinking, as 
Professor Hart suggests, of the tradition that the proportions of 
Doric columns were derived from the ideal masculine figure, and 
that later modifications were similarly derived from the feminine 
figure. The tradition as repeated by Vitruvius (iv, chapter i) does 
not specifically refer to Ionic. Professor Turk suggests that De 
Quincey may have been thinking of a caryatid. However explained, 
the phrase seems more striking than apt. 

89. chase. As in Chevy Chase (see page 6). Consult a large 
dictionary. 

89. corymhi, in the original Greek sense of " a cluster of ivy- 
berries or grapes," not in the English sense, purely botanical, of a 
flower tuft or head. (New English Dictionary.) 

90. quarrel. See the picture in the Century Dictionary, 

93. station of advantage. Compare Macbeth, I, vi, 7. 

94. sweet oblivion of flowers. "Look at nature. She never 
wearies of saying over her floral pater-noster. In the crevices of 
Cyclopean walls, — in the dust where mc:^ ; ie, dust also, — on the 
mounds that bury huge cities, the wreck ol Nineveh and the Babel- 



NOTES 117 

heap, — still that same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen 
of Nature is always a flower." 0. W. Holmes, The Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table (1858), x. 

96. the dreadful sanctus, the " Holy, Holy, Holy," or trisagion ; the 
climax of the preliminary or preparatory part of the Mass. Follow- 
ing the sursum corda (" Lift up your hearts"), it is introduced by 
the words " Therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the 
company of heaven." Perhaps De Quincey had in mind these words 
of the English office (see page 256 of the American Prayer Book) ; 
perhaps he meant to suggest merely the moment of peculiar solemnity 
marked by the sandus bell. 



i 



I 



Longmans- English Classics 

EDITED BY 

GEORGE RICE CARPENTER, A.B. 

Professor of Rhetoric and English Composition in Columbia University 



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